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

[SpineyNorman]

First laugh of the day. Bravo Emma!


HaslandEmma ‏@EmmaHasland
@PennyRed @spineynorman78 is a wanker but he's no racist. I ask 2 polite questions about u calling him a racist + u block me. Why?

And it does me good like it bloody well should!

 

[FreddyB]

It confuses the f'ck out of me, twitter. I can only really use it and follow it on a proper computer with multiple windows open. It's not meant for discussion though is it, it's more LISTEN TO ME!

It's a game. Depends on how you want to play it, what you want out of it. Getting blocked by the likes of Hundal, Harri, Penny etc is really easy, you don't even need to go to the bother of making a cartoon of them. They're all followed by thousands of sycophantic no hopers like the nob head quoted in this thread earlier

Piala Murray ‏@ArielUnbound
@PennyRed @gozooheck @brianwhelanhack @LoveDetective1@spineynorman78 Big male insecure egos upset by big multi-Human multi-Gender Presences

Which basically translates to "look at me Laurie, I'm your friend, be my friend, I don't like the nasty men either."

Harder is to get them to engage with you while taking the piss and picking up followers from them as you go. Not that there's any point to it, unless you want to sell them a t-shirt that's really a piss take anyway but they're too wrapped up their own egos to notice it. I love it myself, it's all the fun especially when they get it wrong because they've not had time to think it through and their ego becomes a massive handicap preventing them from simply typing "Sorry, got it wrong"

 

[cesare]

Presences my precioussssss

 

[kavenism]

Also, "this is why we can't have nice things" - that's what a patronising mother says to her children when they are having a tantrum. Hard to get more condescending than that.

Probably.

 

[TruXta]

One tweet to rule them all, one tweet to bind them,
One tweet to bring them all, and in the Darkness bind them.

In the land of London, where the Statesmen lie.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

I would hope these unnamed so-called individuals got the book name right mind. Or had read it.

i have read it :/ but, yeah, wrong title. shoot me!

there aren't many ppl you could lure into a fred like this but getting engagement with anyone at all has to be different

 

[Balbi]

*daft bastardry*

 

[love detective]

...

jesus fuck, give it a rest

 

[rekil]

"There's a calculation that I've begun to do whenever I find myself visiting an events hall, or a posh set of offices , or the home of someone over 40. I take in the number and size of the rooms and work out how many of the legion poor and peripatetic young people I know could live in the extra space.

I'm currently without secure accommodation for the fourth time this year, and trying desperately to find another hovel within commuting distance of my job. It's draining, and it's debilitating, and it's a daily experience for millions of people with the misfortune to be low earners, or immigrants, or under 30.

She's got a real thing about people with a few years on the clock ain't she? Bloody ageist!

Should we not hold that guest columnist page in the next Girder after all, then?

It's been bumped to make way for a pullout Retro special on bourgeois ageism and middleaged WDS flying columns.

 

[rekil]

...

Ta

 

[butchersapron]

**

 

[Random]

***.

Seeing as how this thread is now a discussion with new public interest I think we need to go Zero Tolerance on personal insults, otherwise all the political posts will be dragged down into the stalking shite.

Edit: you're all way ahead of me

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

****

 

[butchersapron]

Seeing as how this thread is now a discussion with new public interest I think we need to go Zero Tolerance on personal insults, otherwise all the political posts will be dragged down into the stalking shite.

Edit: you're all way ahead of me

Don't help them.

 

[kavenism]

Ta

As requested. Sorry that was a bit crude.
Although you might wish to consider how her experiences around that time might explain her leaping to accusations of misogyny and sexism every time she is criticized. There is something there, and it means that there is little chance of reasoning with her when she does it.

 

[sihhi]

Good spot. It seems that there's a network of private school 'boosting' stuff that i never really knew existed. Motivational talks, network offering opps and so on.

Also interestingly, Laurie Penny's old school, Brighton College is opening another tax evasion school in the low-tax pro-expatriate wealth-hoarding Middle East monarchies.


"Brighton College, Sussex, is to launch a second sister school in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, to be constructed 160 kilometres from the capital city of Abu Dhabi in Al Ain, the Garden City of the United Arab Emirates.
Brighton College UAE will open in September 2013 and will provide a British-style education across the 3 to 18 age range. The Brighton College curriculum will be taught, leading to the award of GCSEs and A-Levels. Pupils will seek entry to the leading UK and US universities. Its stated aim is to become one of the leading schools of the Middle East. ...

Brighton College Abu Dhabi [its first foreign school] opened in 2011 with 580 pupils. Its roll will increase in September to 900 with the opening of Year 10 and its GCSE programmes. Lord Skidelsky, the leading economist and author, and Chairman of Governors of Brighton College, said: "We have been delighted with the success of Brighton College Abu Dhabi, our first sister school. British private education is currently ranked the best in the world by the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation, well ahead of schools in the United States. France. Germany and elsewhere. We are therefore looking forward to opening our second partner school in the UAE where demand for top quality British-style education is strong." (Independent Schools Magazine, June-July 2012)

Lord Skidelsky, by the way, is the pro-Labour "Keynesian" economist biographer + re-populariser of Keynes (see here for example)

Basically anglo- tax evaders in Abu Dhabi (also with its Swiss-style bank accounts) get to send their children to an identikit version of a British private school near where they are domiciled, simply with a few extra ruling Muslim aristocrats' children. The school atmosphere and approach is straight from the home model.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Ah Lord Skidelsky ex SDP, and a author of a Mosely hagiography.

 

[sihhi]

As requested. Sorry that was a bit crude.
Although you might wish to consider how her experiences around that time might explain her leaping to accusations of misogyny and sexism every time she is criticized. There is something there, and it means that there is little chance of reasoning with her when she does it.

Why are you applying armchair psychology to LP? It's meaningless and then some. Are we going to start applying the same approach to Sunny Hundal to uncover why he's such a flip-flopping Obama lover (much worse than Laurie Penny) or David Aaronovitch (is he a grade A prick because his dad Sam was a much respected CPGB economist intellectual, who gave his time to Communist Conferences instead of David). It's overwhelmingly with women that this stuff comes out.

PS As anyone sane would sense that media world - having to deal with the likes of Paul Staines and the right-wing blogs - means that much of the time sexism is directed at Laurie Penny (sexism disguised as politics a la David Starkey - in that battle I'm on Laurie's side 100%).

 

[Firky]

It's not the first bit of pop psychology to appear on this thread but yes.

 

[emanymton]

Someone whose name begins with P? There's also someone from Cambridge who's been put on the 'national membership' and banned from attending branch meetings becuase they didn't like the way they voted in a Unite ballot (some kind of unite election anyway).

And the reply from the CC is an absolute disgrace, I'm quite angry about it - much as I dislike the organization I know some really good people in the SWP and the contempt they're all being shown by the CC is well out of order.

I'm at my mum's with a slow dial up connection so the pdfs will have to wait till I get home this afternoon.

But here's a couple of choice excerpts from the CC's reply:



I sort of agree with this - that leaders should be accountable to the membership and bound by the membership's collective decisions. But they're using this to justify the opposite - the membership being bound by the leadership's decisions.



So the membership is really fucking thick, with no 'clarity of ideas'. But the working class itself is even thicker, and their thickness is contageous - the more embedded we are in workplaces and w/c communities the more their thickness rubs off on us.

Fucking hell, I can see why people hate trots if this is the way the SWP deal with the issue of 'contact sciousness' (for full disclosure I'm far from convinced by the orthodox trot line on this).

They're basically saying that the only time you can have democracy is when you're an isolated sect with no roots in the working class and nothing is going on - so the more important the work gets the less democracy is possible or desirable.

I got them from the cpgb website this morning so have only given them a very quick skim.
Yes p but I won't say any more as I don't want to risk causing any problems for anyone. And yes I agree the CC reply is woefully.
This is not the thread for it but just two things from my quick skim.
First this gem from the very top of Page 21 of number 3

It’s no exaggeration to say that UAF/SWP have been central to Tommy Robinson’s Downfall.

Second looking at the recruitment figures in number 2, I make it 141 union members and 311 students of various ages. Draw your own conclusions. interestingly there seems to be no entry for people not in a union not a student.

Oh, my instinct is that the guy from Cambridge is a bit of a tosser, the sort who makes everyone start groaning every time he speaks in a meeting.

 

[frogwoman]

Second looking at the recruitment figures in number 2, I make it 141 union members and 311 students of various ages. Draw your own conclusions. interestingly there seems to be no entry for people not in a union not a student.

why should there be entry for people who don't really exist

 

[SpineyNorman]

Second looking at the recruitment figures in number 2, I make it 141 union members and 311 students of various ages. Draw your own conclusions. interestingly there seems to be no entry for people not in a union not a student.

Yeah, I liked this part:

The registered membership of the SWP stands at 7,597. This is up on last year’s figure of 7,127, the 2010 figure of 6,587, the 2009 figure of 6,417 and 2008’s of 6,155.

The increase is sort of inevitable when you consider that they never, ever remove anyone from the membership lists. Guess they might if you went on a machine gun massacre or something but that's about it. I left in about 2009 I think and didn't just stop my subs - I sent a long, ranting resignation letter to the office But I assume that the fact they still send me the IBs means I'm still classed as a member!

Sorry, end of derail.

 

[emanymton]

I'm not sure. I know that there's an ongoing row about Mr Fred Perry and that this is related to an ongoing row about sexism in the SWP and that some people have just been expelled, but I've no idea if the last part is anything to do with the first two parts. Why did Paris, Leeds, get the boot?

A few years back, all the gory details would have been all over this place!

We were relaying on you to supply all the gory details.

 

[articul8]

It's like the sex offenders register - once you're on the list...

 

[SpineyNorman]

It's like the sex offenders register - once you're on the list...

I wouldn't know about that

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

It's like the sex offenders register - once you're on the list...

you're articul8?

 

[SpineyNorman]

Yes he is - the name to the left of the post is a dead giveaway though to be honest.

 

[DotCommunist]

I wouldn't know about that

Orr do you?

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

Yes he is - the name to the left of the post is a dead giveaway though to be honest.

meant to be following through his message

 

[chilango]

...'cking hell. I go away for the weekend and this is what awaits me?