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

[equationgirl]

Would this be a time to mention to LP and her ilk little things like fact-checking, putting other people's well-being before a juicy byline, not plagiarising and not falsifying and/or misquoting the people they actually did speak to rather than making up whole interviews with people they've never even met?

Or would demanding proper professional standards be oppressing the poor little darlings with honesty and ethics?

Misogynistic oppressor, oppressing with your demands for professional standards.

 

[love detective]

/ How does it work for race then? Are there people genuinely feeling guilty that they were born white and born in Britain? Really?

 

[sihhi]

http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/3...rivilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html

I got sent this. I don't really understand it all, to be honest, being a thick prole divvy and all, but it does seem rather a long way from almost every instance I've seen of people being asked to check their privilege. I dunno, I just loathe buzzwords like all this stuff. Mansplaining, privilege, trigger warnings...

Oh God that AF document again I made about 4 posts on that document here if you are interested

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/shit-manarchists-say.294600/page-21

noting amongst other things, how it read like a straight import from the US liberal arts college (and probably Ivy League) left, because it refers to Puerto Rico instead of any British or European examples about colonial situations, and it's analysis of 'class privilege' was very weak.

 

[sihhi]

Not to labour the point ld, but that's one example and probably the only one I've ever seen. It's from an specifically Christian organisation which had a sort of run-in of events for a while leading up to the 2007 anniversary of the Act of Parliament against Atlantic slave transportation.

For various reasons they wanted to recreate the chapters in Isaiah about “your sons and daughters coming from afar” (4), “foreigners will rebuild your walls” (10) and “the sons of your oppressor will come bowing before you.” (14) - to prove that the Christian church was a bond between all humanity sort of thing and is against slavery (disputed amongst theologians).

http://www.lifelineexpedition.co.uk/mota/repairers.htm

That's one set of trips to Africa by a tiny group of people for a specifically religious aim, where the 'guilt' or more accurately an expression of guilt for a few hours followed by a feast of togetherness was expressed for a week at most. It has become totemic because they look so silly with the mic and all, but I don't see any evidence of guilt feelings amongst middle-class people, neither on a class basis or a race basis.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

and the book launches. Don't forget the book launches.

And the lunches, darling.

 

[sihhi]

For anyone who is interested this is the Caitlin Moran article for The Times (pay-walled to provide quality journalism according to several professors):

Our Future is Terrifying without Equality
Equality is not humanity’s cashmere bedsocks. It’s not a present. It’s a necessity

When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously. It’s difficult to trust them. They’re a cruel race. Or is that supposed to be the Japanese? I can never remember – I did it because it seemed to be the right thing. The polite thing. The noble thing.
“If we keep excluding people from society – and by ‘people’ I sometimes, ironically, mean me, because I am both working class and a woman – then this will make those people (which are sometimes, let’s not forget, me) sad,” the 13-year-old me would think, virtuously.
“Inequality, wherever it is, upsets people,” I would go on, indignantly. “Poor the immigrants in our area – having burning rags pushed through their letterboxes. And gays, having their love seen as a crime. I would cry if that happened to me. Like I sometimes cry about sexism meaning I’ll never be the Pope, and statistically being unlikely to become CEO of a FTSE 100 company. Society shouldn’t do things that makes people sad. Society needs to be lovely. Society needs to be kind and gentle – like a handsome prince. Why can’t we treat all the minorities to a smile, instead of a frown?”
And I carried on drawing my poster about oppression: an African child crying, and a fat white man wearing a crown and holding two bags of money, standing on top of her. The word “WHY????” was written underneath, in block capitals. I think it might even have had it twice. “WHY????” “WHY?!?!?!?!?” That’s how right on I was, in 1988.
Looking back now, and unpicking my undoubtedly good intentions, it’s interesting to see how I’d come to the right conclusion – but via the wrong reasoning. This idea of equality being the kind thing is rooted in the aristocracy’s noblesse oblige, stepped up a gear with middle-class Victorian philanthropy, and then finessed, via the hippies and The Guardian, into the 21st-century idea of being “right on”, and, for some reason, listening to Billy Bragg.
Currently, believing in societal equality suggests that you have made a moral, selfless decision to redistribute privilege. It is a decision to be good. A decision to be right. And therefore a decision, maybe, to be a bit smug.
However. The problem with proselytising for change on the basis of “good” and “right” is that – with the exception of murdering a child and stuffing it down a well, high on Triad heroin – most issues of morality are annoyingly subjective. There were a lot of people in Ku Klux Klan hoods who believed they were the good guys – even as the trees writhed with strange fruit.
Ultimately, arguing for equality – equality for every peaceable human on Earth to love, live, work and progress as they wish – on a moral basis is an impossibly difficult task.
And it misses – as I missed, at the age of 13 – the biggest point. The urgent point. Which is: equality isn’t some fabulous luxury we can gift ourselves when we’re feeling morally flush. Equality is not… humanity’s cashmere bedsocks. It’s not a present, like champagne. It’s a necessity, like water. For if we look at a map of the world – where every nation struggling with poverty, child mortality and political instability is marked in red – it’s notable that its bright, red, shaming rash coincides almost identically with the most unequal countries in the world. Deny your women education? Imprison your gays, lesbians and transsexuals? Treat your working class like expendable factory parts? Chances are, your country is in trouble.
Because the winning point in favour of equality – which I didn’t know at 13, but I do now – is that we don’t treat ourselves to it. We need it. In the 21st century, humanity’s greatest resource isn’t oil, or titanium, or water, or gold: it’s brains. It’s people’s brains. Tot up all the “minorities” of the world – the gays and disableds and women and working classes, all those “people of colour” – and they are, together, in the majority. They are most of this world. And while we keep these billions of tons of brains – a million ideas, a billion inventions, a trillion ways for the world to be better; an untapped reserve of intellectual oil, big enough to power us into our next 100,000 years – offline, we put humanity in an illogically difficult position. By believing some people are naturally superior, we make our species, as a whole, inferior. Weaker. To be frank: stupider.
So this is where I come from now, as we struggle with female bishops, gay marriage, the “war on women” in America, the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda, a lack of universal suffrage and a million daily evils, on every street, even as economies continue to tank. Because for a little planet with a lot of big problems, equality isn’t an optional extra. Frankly, our future is terrifying without it.

It is a very weak article, almost spitefully anti-leftist. It seems to say 'capitalists aren't a problem, it's other (Third World) countries just not being civilised or stable, dammit'.
And it is odd, to say the least, how certain races become the butt in a joke presumably targetted at liberal condescension: "When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously. It’s difficult to trust them. They’re a cruel race. Or is that supposed to be the Japanese? I can never remember – I did it because it seemed to be the right thing."

 

[snadge]

That's one set of trips to Africa by a tiny group of people for a specifically religious aim, where the 'guilt' or more accurately an expression of guilt for a few hours followed by a feast of togetherness was expressed for a week at most. It has become totemic because they look so silly with the mic and all, but I don't see any evidence of guilt feelings amongst middle-class people, neither on a class basis or a race basis.

Called the María Eva Duarte de Perón moment, these awful tyrants with their OWN privilege or their own twisted view through privileged education think that they still have an address with the working class, call them racist when they don't like how they react, these pretenders, that disguise themselves with 'privilege' or ' identity' camouflage and try and tell people at the the thin edge of the wedge how to fucking act.

First up against the wall.

 

[equationgirl]

For anyone who is interested this is the Caitlin Moran article for The Times (pay-walled to provide quality journalism according to several professors):

It is a very weak article, almost spitefully anti-leftist. It seems to say 'capitalists aren't a problem, it's other (Third World) countries just not being civilised or stable, dammit'.
And it is odd, to say the least, how certain races become the butt in a joke presumably targetted at liberal condescension: "When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously. It’s difficult to trust them. They’re a cruel race. Or is that supposed to be the Japanese? I can never remember – I did it because it seemed to be the right thing."

I thought that was an awful article, and the 'joke' about Chinese/Japanese just summed it up for me, really. If paywalls ensure quality, I dread to think what else is out there.

 

[frogwoman]

that's fucking hideous.

 

[frogwoman]

And the lunches, darling.

less business lunches, more throwing punches

 

[Lo Siento.]

For anyone who is interested this is the Caitlin Moran article for The Times (pay-walled to provide quality journalism according to several professors):




It is a very weak article, almost spitefully anti-leftist. It seems to say 'capitalists aren't a problem, it's other (Third World) countries just not being civilised or stable, dammit'.
And it is odd, to say the least, how certain races become the butt in a joke presumably targetted at liberal condescension: "When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously. It’s difficult to trust them. They’re a cruel race. Or is that supposed to be the Japanese? I can never remember – I did it because it seemed to be the right thing."

Also mind-numbingly dumb. I mean, whatever humanity's greatest resource is it patently isn't "brains". Ask most people who the most creative capitalist of the last 10 years was, and half of them would say Steve Jobs. That is, a man who invented nothing, not one single thing, beyond a marketing campaign. Whose "wealth creation" consisted of doing what capitalists have done for about 100 years now - getting working class people to repetitively do the same task over and over again really quickly for 12 hours a day to make products cheap enough for him to generate a profit on something his "creativity" had naff all to do with.

Under capitalism, the vast majority of productive labour remains dedicated to building, assembling, sewing, moving, digging, sowing and picking. Like fuck does capitalism need or want the ideas, inventions and better ways of doing things of the billions of people doing the things that make their wealth.

 

[Ronnie Rubashov]

"When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously"

If this is meant to be satire, then it offends against the first rule; which is surely: never be flippant about an oppressed minority which can't eat its own babies when in desperate straits. Obviously, the working class can no longer reproduce...and if they do, just where are they hiding? My cleaner's Latvian FFS!...tried for an 'indigenous'...even offered a Gregg's loyalty card with the bus fare supplement.

 

[Frances Lengel]

What's Caitlin Moron (see what I did, do ya, eh, eh?) ever done? Been a presenter on some shit sub-"The Word" "post pub" type programme (Naked City, if memory serves) in the early 90's. And wrote a shit book. Fuck knows how she expects to ever be taken seriously.

 

[equationgirl]

How do so many people get to write such utter drivel AND get it published?

This type of 'journalism' is nothing better than the ramblings of an emo teenager.

 

[Frances Lengel]

How do so many people get to write such utter drivel AND get it published?

This type of 'journalism' is nothing better than the ramblings of an eno teenager.

An emo teen who should've got it out of her system years ago by painting her bedroom black.

 

[equationgirl]

What's Caitlin Moron (see what I did, do ya, eh, eh?) ever done? Been a presenter on some shit sub-"The Word" "post pub" type programme (Naked City, if memory serves) in the early 90's. And wrote a shit book. Fuck knows how she expects to ever be taken seriously.

She became a Fellow at Aberystwyth university in July 2012 too.

 

[Frances Lengel]

She became a Fellow at Aberystwyth university in July 2012 too.

What does being a fellow actually entail - There;s probably a joke in there, but serious question.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

She probably said it was AMAZEBALLS.

 

[Ronnie Rubashov]

What's Caitlin Moron (see what I did, do ya, eh, eh?) ever done? Been a presenter on some shit sub-"The Word" "post pub" type programme (Naked City, if memory serves) in the early 90's. And wrote a shit book. Fuck knows how she expects to ever be taken seriously.

Not sure she expects to tbf. I think she just wants be a laugh...taking an off-beat, sideways, left-field, whimsical look at things.

Thing is: post-irony...everybody does this as a matter of course...for most people under 30, it's the very prism through which they view the world...everything takes its place in a collage of self-deprecation, knowing cynicism and a world-weary fatalism...even 12 year-olds.

I think the notion of somebody doing it for pay, for the benefit of a smallish elite of Times-subscribing, irony-free, 'heteronormative' bank managers is a touch bizarre; like getting remunerated for farting or breathing all day without a break. And she's a retard...and I've read precisely two paragraphs of her writing.

 

[equationgirl]

What does being a fellow actually entail - There;s probably a joke in there, but serious question.

It's just an honorary degree - she doesn't actually have to do anything.

 

[equationgirl]

Not sure she expects to tbf. I think she just wants be a laugh...taking an off-beat, sideways, left-field, whimsical look at things.

Thing is: post-irony...everybody does this as a matter of course...for most people under 30, it's the very prism through which they view the world...everything takes its place in a collage of self-deprecation, knowing cynicism and a world-weary fatalism...even 12 year-olds.

I think the notion of somebody doing it for pay, for the benefit of a smallish elite of Times-subscribing, irony-free, 'heteronormative' bank managers is a touch bizarre; like getting remunerated for farting or breathing all day without a break. And she's a retard...and I've read precisely two paragraphs of her writing.

Don't use the word 'retard' as a perjorative please. It's offensive.

 

[Frances Lengel]

It's just an honorary degree - she doesn't actually have to do anything.

Ah right, cornflake packet then. Still, it's another string to her non existant bow. Thanks for explaining though.

 

[Frances Lengel]

Don't use the word 'retard' as a perjorative please. It's offensive.

Yeah, I agree with that - Ronnie's a pretty funny poster, but there's enough words to choose from without resorting to retard.

 

[snadge]

Stop giving these people platforms.

 

[equationgirl]

Ah right, cornflake packet then. Still, it's another string to her non existant bow. Thanks for explaining though.

No worries, happy to help.

I was more worried that she was actually teaching vacuous crap at a university, and was glad to see that is not the case.

 

[equationgirl]

Stop giving these people platforms.

What people? The 'celeb class war warriors'?

 

[ymu]

Currently, believing in societal equality suggests that you have made a moral, selfless decision to redistribute privilege. It is a decision to be good.

I'm a leftie because I am good and moral and willing to be worse off to make you, poor people, better off.

Monbiot does this one a lot too.

 

[snadge]

What people? The 'celeb class war warriors'?

The identity politicoes and maybe the privilege dividers, the rest of them are hangers on.

Nothing has been said in this very viewed thread that actually helps the working class.

Fucking nothing.

 

[equationgirl]

The identity politicoes and maybe the privilege dividers, the rest of them are hangers on.

Nothing has been said in this very viewed thread that actually helps the working class.

Fucking nothing.

Do the 'working class' need or even want help?

 

[Ronnie Rubashov]

Don't use the word 'retard' as a perjorative please. It's offensive.

Yeah...good point. I'm a complete twat. It's just that I was reading my diary from when I was 13 and saw an entry about someone 'being a retard' and I thought it sounded kinda cool and transgressive, maybe. So I slipped it in to try and look edgy. You're right, I made a total prick of myself.