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

[rekil]

Detention in 1.3 million visual arts centre?

For some reason, she's decided to repost an indy article from last year about 'art and the commodification of dissent.'

What is required is resistance, and real resistance cannot be rehabilitated. The slogan of the modern resistance movement is a clarion cry against irony and apathy, scrawled over occupied classrooms and the wall of the Treasury: "This is actually happening."

Drawing "edgy" art and ironic fashion out of a serious ongoing social movement is grisly social taxidermy, an attempt to turn the awakened beast of public defiance into – in effect – a pickled shark in a tank. A pickled shark in a tank is shocking, but it is safe. The real, open-eyed rage of ordinary people is never safe. It is, however, actually happening.

 

[DaveCinzano]

infrabunking

Metatruancy

 

[DotCommunist]

It's called wagging anyway. And going to your detention is not that.

 

[_angel_]

It's called wagging anyway. And going to your detention is not that.

Wagging? Is that straight out of Tom Brown's schooldays or something???
we called it bunking off, Leeds. Swarthy miles and miles away in Bradford said he'd been expelled for 'slamming off in the woods' which made me think he'd done something rather worse.

 

[weepiper]

Skiving. What she's spent her entire life doing yet mysteriously has ended up getting paid for.

 

[Frances Lengel]

Wagging in in Mcr, though ten miles up the road in Rochdale it was whacking it which, like slamming off, could also sound like a masturbatory euphemism.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Metatruancy

quantumn twagging

 

[Delroy Booth]

I want to vent a bit about "fascist PE teachers in tracksuits" comment that fucking Laurie Penny made. It's pissed me off on a load of different levels.

Firstly, coz I'm a socialist, and I really enjoyed PE. My teachers were supportive and decent, there was no bullying or fascist tendencies from them, and even the kids who weren't sporty got a lot out of it. So maybe Penny's school had crap PE teachers who were bullies, fair enough, but that's not a basis to attack the principle of teaching PE. I had an History teacher who was a psycho and borderline nazi, I wouldn't make any conclusions about teaching History based on my own experiences in that one school.

Why would you skive PE? It's like the easiest thing in school. I used to skive maths. That was something worth skiving. Maths is hard. It's basically broadcasting to the world "I'm too clever and arty to be drawn into your lumpen sports, I'm the cleverest girl in school dontcha know, I'm too good for this running and jumping shit, I'd rather have a detention than demean myself by doing sports." That's how it comes accross to me at least, but I'm probably ridiculously over-sensitive to it.

Why mention the tracksuits? They're fucking PE teachers, of course they're wearing tracksuits. Is there a hint of middle-class snobbery in there? Or am I just being over-sensitive? This tracksuit-phobia of the left does my nut in. I remember at the founding conference of Right to Work in manchester the SWP wouldn't let me and a few of my mates in because a few in our party were wearing tracksuits, despite the fact I was nominally on the fucking steering committee and another one of my friends had been invited to lead a workship on organising the unemployed. They thought we might be EDL trying to infiltrate the event. Bless.

I also hate this argument that people on the left often make, that all organised and competitive sport is a type of conditioning for imperialism and war, I think it's incredibly reductionist and stuipd. Yeah no doubt organised sport does play that role, playing fields of eton and all that, but are people so fucking detached from working-class experience and so ignorant of working-class history not to understand that sport can also be the basis for a grand solidarity between working class people? Like, just picking a random example, the Workers Sport Federation were the ones in the 1930's who committed the mass trespass of Kinder Scout, deliberately trespassing on private land used for grouse-shootng, so that working class people could have the right to walk to moors and hills freely. That single act was a million-times more productive than anything Occupy in this country has managed to accomplish. Or you could look at the Clarion Clubs, or look at the history of Rugby League, these things mobilised and unified working class people in a way that Occupy could only dream of.

/rant over

 

[DaveCinzano]

I think you're overthinking this, Delroy.

 

[Delroy Booth]

I think you're overthinking this, Delroy.

Yeah I know, it's just the whole thing winds me up and here's as good a place as any to have a whinge about it.

 

[Bakunin]

Her word against yours.

Fair's fair, given that her professed worldview is about as genuine as a Rolex bought from some bloke in a pub lock-in, I'd have to side with Butchers on this one. If she said the sky was blue and grass was green I'd look up and down before taking it as gospel.

 

[ViolentPanda]

less emphasis on health and safety please, thin the numbers

Hard to kill with a .22 unless you shoot someone through the eye socket or manage to hit an artery.

 

[DotCommunist]

Hard to kill with a .22 unless you shoot someone through the eye socket or manage to hit an artery.

the temple. and it'll richochet around inside the skull rather than leaving cleanly iirc. There was some mafia hitman who used a .22 but googling is not helping me find his name

 

[ViolentPanda]

the temple. and it'll richochet around inside the skull rather than leaving cleanly iirc. There was some mafia hitman who used a .22 but googling is not helping me find his name

I'd prefer not to burden our NHS with persistently-vegetative posho bed-foulers, though.

 

[DaveCinzano]

I'd prefer not to burden our NHS with persistently-vegetative posho bed-foulers, though.

For this we have BUPA.

 

[Bakunin]

the temple. and it'll richochet around inside the skull rather than leaving cleanly iirc. There was some mafia hitman who used a .22 but googling is not helping me find his name

The .22 automatic with silencer is the most popular handgun amongst hitmen (gang-affiliated and freelance), the Hi Standard being an especially popular make as it does indeed come with its own silencer. It's quiet enough that if you were sitting in a car with tinted windows on a New York street you could shoot someone through the back of the head and nobody would see you do it or hear the shot. Using a heavy calibre weapon like a 9mm or.45 would make that impossible and I certainly wouldn't use a sawn-off and then attempt to use valet parking.

 

[DaveCinzano]

The .22 automatic with silencer is the most popular handgun amongst hitmen (gang-affiliated and freelance), the Hi Standard being an especially popular make as it does indeed come with its own silencer. It's quiet enough that if you were sitting in a car with tinted windows on a New York street you could shoot someone through the back of the head and nobody would see you do it or hear the shot. Using a heavy calibre weapon like a 9mm or.45 would make that impossible and I certainly wouldn't use a sawn-off and then attempt to use valet parking.

 

[treelover]

'Why mention the tracksuits? They're fucking PE teachers, of course they're wearing tracksuits. Is there a hint of middle-class snobbery in there? Or am I just being over-sensitive? This tracksuit-phobia of the left does my nut in. I remember at the founding conference of Right to Work in manchester the SWP wouldn't let me and a few of my mates in because a few in our party were wearing tracksuits, despite the fact I was nominally on the fucking steering committee and another one of my friends had been invited to lead a workship on organising the unemployed. They thought we might be EDL trying to infiltrate the event. Bless.'

That says so much about the far left, well specifically the SWP, how on earth can they ban people for not wearing the right clothes?

 

[treelover]

in fact, how does he get in to these events?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ma...nH0QW8vIGwCg&ved=0CDoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1666&bih=922

more here....

 

[rekil]

I also hate this argument that people on the left often make, that all organised and competitive sport is a type of conditioning for imperialism and war, I think it's incredibly reductionist and stuipd.

If this blistering letter from comrade Kev Waddington to the morning star doesn't jerk you out of the fog of such fanciful conceits I dunno what will.

Sport as we know it as a competitive enterprise is not "natural" but started with the development of capitalism.

The ideology of sport reflects capitalist ideology and the capitalist organisation of factory production: division of labour, specialisation, maximum output, hierarchical and bureaucratic organisation.

When sport is taught to children, the child increasingly has to abandon all spontaneity, inventiveness and playfulness, as rigid rules, discipline, authority and a sadomasochistic outlook take over.

 

[Delroy Booth]

I mean that's such simple minded bollocks I don't even know where to start. Perhaps sport "as we know it" now reflects capitalism, or in most cases has been bought up wholesale and turned into an industry in itself, but you can find evidence of competetive and organised sport in societies long before the development of capitalism. And yes, in those ancient societies, sport was used as training for war too.

This sentence is clearly written by someone who's not very good at sport "When sport is taught to children, the child increasingly has to abandon all spontaneity, inventiveness and playfulness" Really? Because you won't very far in a lot of sports without those things in abundance.

I also think that people have probably been competing with each other to see who could run the fastest since time immemorial, it way well have been appropriated to fulfill these roles later on, but it doesn't really explain where it comes in the first place.

 

[agricola]

If this blistering letter from comrade Kev Waddington to the morning star doesn't jerk you out of the fog of such fanciful conceits I dunno what will.

I cant believe you left out the call demand for more yoga, group dancing and nature walking.

 

[Bakunin]

Skiving. What she's spent her entire life doing yet mysteriously has ended up getting paid for.

In fairness, this isn't dissimilar to many media types. It's just that many of them have either the guile or the grace to recognise that it's money for old rope compared to many jobs and don't feel a compulsive urge to bullshit their way up the greasy pole to a nicely lucrative level before perpetually whimpering about how hard and challenging it supposedly is in the style of Kevin the Teenager (it isn't, by the way, unless you also have a compulsive desire to inflict yourself on others in an entirely tiresome fashion, to an equally tiresome degree, by desperately using any old PR trick that you think will get an extra iota of attention).

They've also got more intelligence, as a rule, than to publicly adopt an attitude that suggests that they themselves are infinitely more important than whatever story they trying to cover.

 

[JimW]

I cant believe you left out the call demand for more yoga, group dancing and nature walking.

That does tip it over into likely clever piss-take territory, I reckon. He can't be serious. Please

 

[The39thStep]

More news from class war torn London ( via visiting some London underground stations) under the Olympic occupation of multi international corporations

At half past 10, Stockwell station, where a Brazilian electrician was gunned down in 2005 by anti-terrorist police who’d followed the wrong brown man off the bus, is doing its best to be clean and uncontroversia

Rolling her machine with practiced effort onto the Hammersmith train, Lisa and I talk about the fight to stop the right-wing Coalition government currently squatting in Westminster – the very shiniest stop on the Jubilee line – from slashing welfare benefits and driving the poor and sick out of the city.

St James’ Park Station, 6 p.m. Three years ago a man was killed in London. This in itself is not news; people die here every day, and in the past two decades 1443 people have done so following contact with the police, although not a single Metropo

Faith in the legal system is fading here, especially in the run-up to the games, which have allowed the Met to deliver short-order sentencing to any young people suspected of loitering whilst unemployed.

One of them explains to an eager news reporter that if this was France, the station would be on fire by now. But this is London, and right now, London feels beaten.

mention this because London is hosting the Olympic Games in much the same way that Maria Callas hosted that tapeworm. It seemed like a great idea at the time. It seemed like it’d keep us modern and relevant and beautiful. But now it’s eating us from the inside, squatting in the East End draining away billions from an economy already in a double-dip recession, and doing terrifying things to the body politic.]

 

[rekil]

I cant believe you left out the call demand for more yoga, group dancing and nature walking.

I agree with that bit.

 

[cesare]

More news from class war torn London ( via visiting some London underground stations) under the Olympic occupation of multi international corporations

You're in London today?

 

[butchersapron]

One of them explains to an eager news reporter that if this was France, the station would be on fire by now. But this is London, and right now, London feels beaten.

Yeah?

Oddly enough, this is the same city you sell other papers as 'fighting back' and you as it's chief correspondent

 

[JHE]

At half past 10, Stockwell station, where a Brazilian electrician was gunned down in 2005 by anti-terrorist police who’d followed the wrong brown man off the bus...

Perhaps Ms Penny and the Social Workers should kiss and make up. They (and assorted posters on U75) also liked to claim that the killing was racist.

Jean Charles de Menezes was white, but they won't let that stand in the way of the story of racist white plod killing a "brown man".

 

[butchersapron]

Also, they didn't follow the wrong man off a bus. They followed a single man from his exit from his block.

And, of course racism did play a part in identifying him - then in how he was dealt with.