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

[smokedout]

she's getting flamed on twitter, she just asked johnnie marbles if he's the cream pie pratt

there'll be chablis spilt by bedtime

 

[smokedout]

Polly Toynbee ‏@pollytoynbee
Johann Hari, one the best, is no plagiarist. Save your wrath for the abominartions and harrassments by the Murdoch/Mail press.
Retweeted by Aaron Peters

they're all in it together!

(actually aaron is slagging her off so i take that bit back)

 

[sihhi]

A 'classic' Suzanne Moore piece declaring herself not middle-class:

New Statesman, December 18, 1998

Down and out in the class war; Suzanne Moore notes the death of the working-class hero - destroyed by drink, drugs, sex and violence - but still hopes for working-class heroines.

A working-class hero is something to be. But only if you like the working class and much of the time I don't. I grew up in a class where people made themselves deliberately stupid; they became narrow-minded, closed down and hemmed in. I cannot romanticise the working class and, even if I wanted to, there are few role models. If I were male and northern, maybe I could see myself in a Ken Loach movie or Coronation Street or even glimpse something of myself in the contorted exclamations of John Prescott; but I am female and from the south. I have never lived in Victoria Wood-land nor am I one of the Scots, the new carriers of authentic working-class identity. Anyway, I have moved class. Accidentally, grudgingly perhaps, but undeniably. I got an education and a job in the media. How much more upwardly mobile do you want? I don't work in Boots, which would have been my mother's aspiration for me. Yet I am not comfortable with being middle class because, if there is anything worse than the working classes, it is the middle classes, and any prolonged encounter with a middle-class person reminds me that I am not one of them. I just do not have the sense of entitlement, nor the capacity for worry. Strangely enough, I managed to avoid the full horror of the bourgeoisie, even though I studied a lot of Marxist theory at college. An interesting theory, I thought lumpenly at the time, but nothing to do with my life. It was only when I was asked to read books called things like Working-Class Culture that I started to feel uncomfortable. My culture, I argued now that I was finally aware that I was in possession of one, should not be an object of anthropological study. 'Who walks around with books called Middle-Class Culture?' I demanded. It wasn't till I worked at the Guardian that I fully realised what it meant to be middle class. Not just middle class... but concerned. Anger may be an energy, as Johnny Rotten may have sung, but anger is a working-class energy. To be middle class, I realised, was to be permanently indignant but never full of the kind of righteous and bloody-minded anger that makes you know you are alive. It also means, as far as I can tell, never really enjoying yourself.
Yet we still talk of the petty demarcations of class as though they are entirely external, as though they reside in consumer choices rather than in a mindset. We still tolerate clearly ridiculous statements like 'the classless society'. We still say that class doesn't matter. Well, it matters to me more and more. It continues to shape my life in ways that I am increasingly resentful of and at the same time grateful for. I am, as they say in California, 'conflicted'. So was John Lennon when he wrote 'Working-Class Hero'. It is the nature of the beast. That is why working-class heroes fall from grace so easily.
Look at Gazza. Look at Noel and Liam. Once we cheered their 'attitude'. Now they are just rich and boorish instead of poor and thick. They went from shoplifting outlaws to shopaholics in just one album. Witness every punch-drunk boxer, every cheating celebrity hairdresser, every footballer coked out of his brain beating up his girlfriend in a nightclub, and ask yourself: what kind of heroes are they? Or take homeboy John Major, who could have been a contender, a class warrior worth celebrating but became . . . John Major.
No, the working-class hero these days represents no one except himself. And then not for long. He is little more than some nostalgic throwback. The decline of industry and the entrance of women into the workforce make a mockery of traditional notions of working-class life. No one really wants working-class men any more. Advertisers ignore them. Tabloid newspapers salivate, not at the thought of the man in the street, but at the young, aspirational woman worker.
The working-class hero, now a member of the long-term unemployed, exists only as fiction and even then he is hardly heroic. He is in the books of Irvine Welsh, in the dirty realism of Richard Billingham's art, in the emotionally deformed Mitchell brothers of EastEnders. He is bowed. He is tearing himself apart. He is no longer sure of who he is. More often than not, working-class masculinity these days is portrayed as simply unlivable. The working-class hero does not disrupt the class system, he does not even challenge it, he simply destroys himself with drink and drugs, sex and violence. His self-annihilation is performed right under Tony's grinning shadow and new Labour's talk of social exclusion. He has been superseded by working-class wannabees, 'lads' of all ages and all classes who have co-opted working-class pastimes to pass them off as their own. For the middle class, class identity has always been something of a pick 'n' mix affair. Remember Blair's descent into Essex man on the Des O'Connor show.
Cultural slumming is sanctified in the worlds of art and literature in the pursuit of all that is 'real': the monotony of poverty, the deadly boredom, the routine self-oppression. Working-class life may be freeze-framed, but not understood. Instead, we talk a kind of code: inner city, sink estates, crime, heroin epidemics, single mothers, ethnic minorities, teenage pregnancies. What are these things if not a way of talking about working-class life? Why pretend otherwise? Every so often, something comes along which tells it like it is and we are repulsed. Nick Davies's book Dark Heart revealed, as the subtitle put it, 'the shocking truth about hidden Britain', but we didn't really want to know. Gordon Burn's book Happy Like Murderers was condemned because its subject matter - the lives of Fred and Rosemary West - revealed a way of life we do not want to know is lived alongside our own. Gary Oldman's stunning Nil by Mouth showed us victims victimising each other. There was no moral uplift to be found here, and the film was better for it. Such grim representatives of working-class existence may not be positive role models, but it is too late in the day because positive inequality is increasing. ... I sit and watch The Royle Family, a depiction of working-class life, in all its farting glory, a culture of catalogues, chain-smoking, singalongs and endless telly and wonder at the genius of Caroline Aherne, whose suicide attempt I read of in the papers. Or I watch the work of that underrated actress Patsy Palmer, another troubled soul, who plays the wonderful Bianca in EastEnders. I marvel at the continuing brilliance of Kathy Burke in whatever she does.

 

[Firky]

Polly Toynbee ‏@pollytoynbee
Johann Hari, one the best, is no plagiarist. Save your wrath for the abominartions and harrassments by the Murdoch/Mail press.
Retweeted by Aaron Peters

they're all in it together!

(actually aaron is slagging her off so i take that bit back)

It amuses me no end how these lot back slap and back stab each over twitter. It's worse than here

 

[sihhi]

It amuses me no end how these lot back slap and back stab each over twitter. It's worse than here

On his twitter Aaron Peters the Miliband and PhD guy who hosted LP's show becomes a sort of anti-Sunny Hundal: this picture:- his chest and Hundal's face

 

[Firky]

On his twitter Aaron Peters the Miliband and PhD guy who hosted LP's show becomes a sort of anti-Sunny Hundal: this picture:- his chest and Hundal's face

I saw that he had that as his background on twitter but I did not realise who's chest it was, good god! What goes on in their head??

 

[sihhi]

I saw that he had that as his background on twitter but I did not realise who's chest it was, good god! What goes on in their head??

I don't know.
Do you want to ask him to give a reply on twitter?

I like Owen Jones's background:

Johnny Marbles has this as his picture:

Aaronovitch has his every answer-a-revolutionary moment of gameshow failure:

 

[Balbi]

Transphobia's the new black.

Or, rather, entirely linguistically purism is the objective, and using commonly understood references whoch in any way infringe upon any other identity group is exploitation/phobia/hatred of that group and is therefore not allowed and must be addressed above and beyond any other points raised - regardless of whether or not there is more that unites than divides.

One does not simply speak outside of ones identity and privilege. Which is very close to there being no such thing as society.

 

[Balbi]

Or rather - some journalists write things that I agree with, and then the next week make me ragemonster out with something I don't agree with. The fact that so many 'names' within the activist/left/journo community are j'accuse'ing like a bunch of blind farters, and in the case of Jonnie Marbles lamenting 'so that's another person I have to cross off my increasingly short list of halfway decent people'. The fact that the people they're willing to include, listen to, engage with have to meet their approval is the hierarchy of oppression writ large.

"I care about x more issues than you, therefore your y issue is less relevant and how dare you only mention z in passing/for comic effect"

The whole mess is because she referred to the ideal female body being that of a 'brazilian transsexual' and the criticism is she shouldn't have used that example because lots of brazilian transsexuals are murdered as a result of transphobia, and she's aiding that oppression. Which is fucking nuts.

 

[Steel Icarus]

Transphobia's the new black.

Or, rather, entirely linguistically purism is the objective, and using commonly understood references whoch in any way infringe upon any other identity group is exploitation/phobia/hatred of that group and is therefore not allowed and must be addressed above and beyond any other points raised - regardless of whether or not there is more that unites than divides.

One does not simply speak outside of ones identity and privilege. Which is very close to there being no such thing as society.

I've been thinking exactly that. How very Thatcherite. The individual is the most important, above all other things. Only when every individual is pigeonholed and every difference catalogued can we get on with that other business of making a more egalitarian society. Which might admittedly mean talking to people who don't talk exclusively in abstractions (shudder).

 

[Balbi]

It's the individual issue over the collective. It's not enough to be mindful or sensitive, everything that is written or said or done must be processed and checked to ensure it doesn't contribute to oppression of others, offending their identity, denigrating their privilege etc.

Theory, carried to an absurd extreme.

 

[Brixton Hatter]

Intersectionality is good in theory, though in practice, it means that no one can speak for anyone else. It is the dead-end where much queer politics, feminist politics and identity politics ends up. In its own rectum. It refuses to engage with many other political discourses and becomes the old hierarchy of oppression.

Is the correct answer Suzanne Moore.

LP's mates are going absolutely bananas on Twitter about this

 

[Balbi]

It's the theory banner bearers, they get ever so annoyed when theory meets practice and gets its arse kicked by experience.

It's alright to exist on theory, to live by it, as long as you don't meet anyone who disagrees with you. You know, like people.

I'm waiting for LP's mates to start with some subtle, or not so subtle, ageism.

Although I am starting to read up a bit more on intersectional stuff.

 

[Ronnie Rubashov]

I can be a bit of a moody bastard, but when I'm on form and being reasonable I tend to think I like to treat people as I would wish to be treated...courteous, respectful etc. But, to be honest, I'm not sure just how much 'research' I'm expected to undertake to ensure I don't fall foul of any of the potential pitfalls surrounding identity/intersectionality. If somebody told me I needed to go and educate myself about their particular self-selected identity because I'd inadvertently offended them, I'd regard that as presumptuous and a fuckin liberty...not just that; it seems quite the thing lately to describe an unintentional offence against identity X as Xphobic rather than the result of a lack of awareness. It seems that failing to keep oneself at the 'cutting-edge' of intersectionality is regarded as wilful ignorance and discrimination.

This is just bollocks. As adherents of this kinda stuff seem to be constructing ever more intricate systems of identity and concomitant offences against them, it's unreasonable to expect people to keep abreast of developments; especially as the finer points of etiquette seem to be formulated by cabals of righteous adolescent muppets and then handed down from on high via twitter. Fuck that.

That said, I'm not advocating going back to the days of Love thy Neighbour. I can even remember a PE teacher who would stand on the touch line screaming 'nancy-boy' or 'you big girl's blouse' at anyone who missed a tackle...and who once commiserated with a black lad's poor performance with a javelin with a "I thought you people were good at chuckin them things". But there has to be a fuckin limit.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

That said, I'm not advocating going back to the days of Love thy Neighbour. I can even remember a PE teacher who would stand on the touch line screaming 'nancy-boy' or 'you big girl's blouse' at anyone who missed a tackle...and who once commiserated with a black lad's poor performance with a javelin with a "I thought you people were good at chuckin them things". But there has to be a fuckin limit.

I praise your progressive, modern approach.

 

[sihhi]

That said, I'm not advocating going back to the days of Love thy Neighbour. I can even remember a PE teacher who would stand on the touch line screaming 'nancy-boy' or 'you big girl's blouse' at anyone who missed a tackle...and who once commiserated with a black lad's poor performance with a javelin with a "I thought you people were good at chuckin them things". But there has to be a fuckin limit.

There are people in the education system who still do use this kind of quasi-sexist insult, except in an "ironic way".

In the meantime, more modern communism from Nick Lezard:

If you’re standing in my neck of the woods, it’s lovely, but only millionaires or the inordinately fortunate live there. If you live, as do my children, in Shepherd’s Bush, then it’s dreadful. I was stationed there [Shepherd's Bush] for 17 years or so before being thrown out and it has got scuzzier and scarier as the years have gone by. I used to take some pride in living in a place that was resistant to gentrification, but the Bush takes this idea too far. Walk the streets outside commuter hours and you will not lack for the company of the deranged, the extravagantly drunk, the incredibly smelly, and the wannabe gangsta barely controlling a slobbering pit bull at the end of a leash. (Boy, do those animals raise the tone of a neighbourhood. Viz magazine calls them “shit machines” and, as in so many matters it touches on, is right on the money.) And Shepherd’s Bush isn’t even nearly the worst part of London. This kind of thing is exacerbated, or you notice it more because you’re on foot more, when there’s a Tube strike. As I drove my son and three of his friends back from a school cricket match, they asked me what the latest strike was about. I went into a long and perhaps alarming rant about how though most of the time I was generally in favour of industrial action, in this case the RMT’s bewildering demand to reinstate one Tube driver who was dangerously incompetent and another who was accused of being a thief surpassed my comprehension; and that the only plausible explanation was that Bob Crow was a secret government lackey, employed to discredit the trade union movement by forfeiting any sympathy the public might have had for the rest of their demands.

 

[DotCommunist]

most of the time I was generally in favour of industrial action, in this case

it inconvenienced me

 

[sihhi]

Notice how few picked up in the piece Suzanne Moore was attending a dinner with Iain Duncan Smith!:

In this country, the red warning lights were flashing at the last election when women were largely invisible except as trophy wives. Women’s “issues” are still something to be tacked onto another ministerial department. The ideas of quotas is still abhorrent to those born to rule: white men. Those who refute social engineering are themselves the products of the best social engineering money can buy: public school and then Oxbridge. Oh yes, I know there are token women and the Top Trump always remains Margaret Thatcher. Having often featured myself as a token woman, I find the role an insult in 2012. At a dinner with Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions charged with reforming the benefits system, I heard him telling the assembled guests what it was like being a single parent, I sat silent, waiting to be asked my views, as I am one. A scarlet flush was spreading across my chest. This was far from post-coital colour. My blood was rising. The anger could not be swallowed. I left the table.

This kind of action is not fashionable. We cloak our vitriol in humour. I get it. I do it too. Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to Be a Woman is a brilliantly funny read because it is so warm and not really very angry towards men. We can all be dudes. But former Sex Pistol John Lydon’s chant , “anger is an energy”, is still my cri de coeur. The cliché is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual. We are angry that men do not do enough. We are angry at work where we are underpaid and overlooked. This anger can be neatly channelled and outsourced to make someone a fat profit. Are your hormones okay? Do you need a nice bath? Some sex tips and an internet date? What if, contrary to Sex and the City, new shoes do not fill the hole in your soul? What if you aspire to another model of womanhood than the mute but beautifully groomed Kate Middleton? What if your anguish is not illogical but actually bloody spot on? Maybe your man can read Men’s Health and use the “11 ways to deal with an angry woman” advice. Eye contact and admitting you are were wrong come into it! Who knew? Those more vulnerable, the women in our midst going without dinner so the kids can eat, are they going to be helped by talking of anger as an issue of intimacy? The Etonian clones abandoned these women long ago and are producing policies that directly target them.

That tells us something about the media.

The clause - the only reference to transexuals - is unnecessary and ill-advised, even though it's playing on a positive stereotype.

 

[SpineyNorman]

In the meantime, more modern communism from Nick Lezard:

Wow, is he LP's (former?) housemate and Derbyshire crack dealer lookalike or is that someone else? I can't keep up with all these names. They should all be given the same surname or something just to make it easier to identify them.

 

[DotCommunist]

Lezard is her current housemate. He of the vodka and radishes habit

 

[sihhi]

it inconvenienced me

He certainly doesn't like being inconvenienced:

So, there I was, idling late at night in front of the telly, when on came the late film: John Schlesinger's 1967 work, Far from the Madding Crowd. Julie Christie! Terence Stamp! Alan Bates! Peter Finch! Cinematography by Nicolas Roeg! Screenplay by Frederic Raphael, which would probably then be pretty faithful to Hardy's novel! As I say, it was late, but I didn't have to get up early the next day. I was in the country myself at the time, and thought that this would be just the ticket. And it so nearly was. But just as the dialogue started, up popped a fat little man in a highly anachronistic shirt, who started gesticulating wildly in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen. Oh, bollocks, I thought. It's the sign-language man again. It's not always a fat man in a red shirt. Sometimes it's a woman in a frumpy dress. Sometimes it's a woman in a plain but tasteful dress. Sometimes it's a man in a white shirt. Once, I distinctly recall, it was a man in a purple shirt. But they all had this in common: they were rendering the dialogue in sign language for the deaf, and they were completely ruining the film. (And sometimes it's not even a film they're ruining, but a piece of late-night telly hokum which would otherwise be a nice guilty pleasure.) I have put up with this phenomenon on occasion, but never for very long; there is a limit to the length of time one can watch a film with one eye closed and one's thumb extended in an attempt to blot out the little man in the corner. For when a film has been panned and scanned to make it fit the small screen, he ends up filling rather a large percentage of the action. At one point he was covering Julie Christie's face in its entirety. I don't know about you, but I find the sight of Julie Christie's face considerably more pleasurable than that of a portly homunculus making expansive gestures, not all of which, one suspects, are capable of conveying the nuances of Thomas Hardy's words, as mediated by the cunning intelligence of Frederic Raphael. As for what Nicolas Roeg might have to say about what he was doing to his cinematography, one shudders to think. It is, of course, laudable that an effort is being made to include the deaf in the potential audience for television. But at this cost? Please, someone, answer me this: what the hell is wrong with subtitles? Are the schedulers catering for deaf people who cannot read English? Or who cannot read, full stop? There is, I admit, a certain symmetry in trying to get the illiterate to watch a film based on a Thomas Hardy novel, as illiteracy or near-illiteracy features in more than one of them, but it is not, I suspect, a symmetry intended by the kind people at ITV2.

Also what do u75 make of "the kind of people at ITV2"? Is that just old-fashioned snobbery or an attack on the capitalist media - I'm not sure what's what.

 

[Ronnie Rubashov]

#Walk the streets outside commuter hours and you will not lack for the company of the deranged, the extravagantly drunk, the incredibly smelly, and the wannabe gangsta barely controlling a slobbering pit bull at the end of a leash.#

Well I'm detecting a distict ableist vibe..."deranged"...surely 'cognitively diverse' or some such. I'm also picking up an elitist cast of mind regarding personal hygiene. Most incriminating, though, is his disparagement of the lumpen proletariat. The correct response is to engage with them to enable consiousness of their exploited role within the wider bourgeois political-economy...not takin the piss outta their staffies.

He's not my kinda communist...In fact,in my fantasy-state he'll be Gulag fodder...or collecting trolleys in ASDA's car park...in East Kilbride.

Just a useless middle-class cunt...trying desperately to be a bit of a character and a notorious contrarian. There seems to be a bit of an escalating arms-race among the contenders to the position of Hitchen's heir. They're all a bunch of shitehawks.

 

[Orang Utan]

Are you accusing Nick Lezard of being a communist?

 

[SpineyNorman]

He certainly doesn't like being inconvenienced:



Also what do u75 make of "the kind of people at ITV2"? Is that just old-fashioned snobbery or an attack on the capitalist media - I'm not sure what's what.

I don't know but if anyone ever needed to check their privilege it's him - and how could someone so right on as LP live with someone who dismisses the needs of deaf people like that? Talk about double standards - she'd have jumped on that if any of us had said it.

 

[DotCommunist]

I went into a long and perhaps alarming rant about how though most of the time I was generally in favour of industrial action, in this case the RMT’s bewildering demand to reinstate one Tube driver who was dangerously incompetent and another who was accused of being a thief surpassed my comprehension

Lezard is willing to dismiss democratically taken union decisions based on accusations when it causes him grief. Whats the line about liberals? Vaguely onside on a good day, bang to the right when it affects them directly

 

[Ronnie Rubashov]

Are you accusing Nick Lezard of being a communist?

Yeah fuck it...why not? He's a self-aware, politically conscious prole who just had the misfortune of being born into a slough of bourgeois privilege...just like his mates. He deserves your sympathy...not your derision.

 

[butchersapron]

Maybe his privileges (westminister then oxbridge) is of the same type that holds penny and others back?

 

[sihhi]

Maybe his privileges (westminister then oxbridge) is of the same type that holds penny and others back?

No, he's a 'laureate of the low life' and he gives a helping hand to struggling 'Tertullians' like Will Self:

Will Self and Nick Lezard visit a no-nonsense Leicester Square restaurant (New Statesman, Mike Danson era)

You can't get realer when it comes to meals than chowing down with the Statesman's own laureate of the low life, Nick Lezard. I've known Nick for years (ever since, in fact, he compared my prose to that of the classical emeticist Tertullian), and together we've eaten some memorable meals, including that Highland police-evading delicacy poulet au hashish, but in recent years - as his column amply confirms - Nick has fallen on hard times. True, he never exactly lived high on the hog, but now he barely scrapes by low on the streaky. It would have been unfair to subject Nick to the snail sorbets and caviar casseroles served up at London's top tables - let alone stick him with the bill - so I suggested that we rendezvous at the Stockpot near Leicester Square. The Stockpot is one of a mini-chain of three restaurants offering plain, wholesome British cuisine (with a few Italian fripperies) at scandalously low prices. You can have a three-course meal for two at the Stockpot, with wine, for well under 40 quid. Unbelievable, no? I mean, in most West End restaurants you can barely get a maître d' to sneer at you for that kind of money. I'm not altogether certain what the genesis of the Stockpot was, but all three outlets have a powerful ambience of having been there since time out of mind. Granted, the Stockpot is a metropolitan phenomenon, but I like to think that every British city still has its equivalent: somewhere that dishes up liver and bacon, bubble and squeak, fish and chips - all the binary conjunctions that once made up the bedrock of the British diet before the creation of chicken tikka masala. I often used to eat at the branch (now closed) on Basil Street, behind Harrods, which was much frequented by cabbies, and there was nothing more comforting than watching these cockney knights of the open road spoon down their jelly and custard while inveighing against wobbly modernity. I pressured Nick towards the liver and bacon with onion gravy and veg - a snip at £6.50; while I had chicken Kiev with rice and veg - a relatively expensive £7.90. I say "pressured" because I wanted to know what the liver and bacon was like, without having to eat it myself. But then I'm like that in relation to a lot of experiences, both sensual and aesthetic. I also want to know what the foam night at Space is like, but I have no intention of going. Jules Verne picked up on this tendency over a century ago, when he remarked of Phileas Fogg that he was the kind of Englishman who sends his manservant to see the sights for him.
Passepartout also had the whitebait to start with, at my insistence. He enjoyed both heartily. "Um, um," he ummed, "this is really quite good - you should try some." And I did, just to please him. My soup wasn't too bad either, giving the lie to that school of thought which says you can spend all day making soup only to end up with something that tastes marginally worse than what you get out of a can. However, with the chicken Kiev, I hit the culinary rumble strip and juddered to a halt. Like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, chicken Kiev was an integral part of the early 1970s. They were disaster movies; it was disaster cuisine - a great lowering lump of crap chicken, filled with garlic butter and herbs before being coated in breadcrumbs and fried. Chicken Kiev felt anachronistic at its inception. Forty years on, I felt as if I were in a 1970s episode of Doctor Who in which cavaliers duelled with cyborgs. Nick was faring no better with his liver and bacon; it had begun promisingly - the meat was tender and tasty - but soon ploughed into the escape lane filled with onion gravy. We tried to stimulate our jaded palates by putting these plates aside and ordering peach-and-apple pie with custard (£2.95), and chocolate sponge pudding with chocolate custard (£3.20), but it was too late - we were stuffed. The only thing we had any appetite for was the bill, which came in at £40, allowing a generous 20 per cent tip for the waitress.
I say "we" had an appetite for the bill, but in the spirit of this column I must tell it like it is: I'd gone out without enough cash, and obviously the Stockpot hasn't heard of plastic - yet. So, Nick was obliged to pay the greater part of the bill. No wonder he's down and out.

 

[DotCommunist]

I say "pressured" because I wanted to know what the liver and bacon was like, without having to eat it myself. But then I'm like that in relation to a lot of experiences, both sensual and aesthetic.

made an exception for the brown

 

[cesare]

There are people in the education system who still do use this kind of quasi-sexist insult, except in an "ironic way".

In the meantime, more modern communism from Nick Lezard:

That actually wound me up rather than just thinking "oh, ffs" which is my usual reaction to LP.