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

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He was a better read than Laurie as well wasn't he? I suppose fiction always adds vigour to your writing but he seemed better in terms of style and tone.

A wanker of course. I'm not saying otherwise.

Definitely. Laurie's articles often read as if they've been produced in five minutes, I suspect Hari puts more effort in.
 
Definitely. Laurie's articles often read as if they've been produced in five minutes, I suspect Hari puts more effort in.

Do you think so? I get the impression she's pored over every word and phrase repeatedly. Look at the way she is in interviews. She repeatedly stumbles over what she's saying, gets tongue-tied and goes to great lengths to insert prearranged puns, jokes or 'biting' phrases...all a bit lame and contrived. Her speech has no natural flow. She's a striver, not a natural stylist. Her prose has that overworked feel which acquires a sort of ersatz unprocessed quality only through repeated reworking.
 
Aye - if she's stopping in conversation with her bezzers on the radio to make sure she says ONLY the "right" things for the brand then you can be sure she does it with her red pen of justice.
 
Mmm, if I remember rightly most of the attention happened after proven cases of plagiarism, which is a rather different thing. I don't think he got the same level of attention for his everyday writing. I suppose I can't prove that Laurie gets more attention for being a young woman leftie writer...

Well that's obviously true...but that's why she gets the criticism. She is...let's face it...in either national or global terms the product of a hyperprivileged upbringing and education. At some point, she clearly decided being 'a young woman leftie writer' would best suit as her particular schtick. Now this obviously presented problems given that it was a little incongruous with her background. It is precisely her attempt to dismiss this incongruity which causes the responses she gets. It infects everything she writes; makes it seem contrived, self-serving and insincere.

In order to present herself as somehow personally involved in the struggles she describes she seems to have decided she needed a back story dripping with oppression. Obviously, not getting the pony you wanted or the trials of a stultifying adolescence trapped in the stockbroker belt don't really cut the Colman's. So, instead, we get her lifelong battle with patriarchal tyranny...and the time she and a few of her Oxbridge compemporaries had to live on cold beans, huddling around a 60 watt bulb to stay alive...all blown up into patently fantastical proportions. Hence the ridicule she attracts.
 
Julie Burchill is in on it now: "Transexual mob telling Suzanne Moore how to write makes me think of the Black & White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run"

Can you remember where was this quote was from? cos she used it in the Guardian CiF piece that was published last night and is apparently in the print edition of the Observer today, and it really confused me when I read it, cos I knew I'd seen it before.
 
Without being offensive towards people with mental health issues; are Bindel, Burchill and Moore fucking nuts?

Possibly...but I think they're making a point about intersectionality and the background of the majority of media commentators...only in a manner which will guarantee them a load more page hits and a few more columns by stoking the flames. They're not so stupid they don't realise what they're doing.
 
It's going to bite them in the arse though, there wasn't a trans-mob/cabal - but there will be now.

"I'm passionate about x subject so to demonstrate it I will use words that are offensive to y and z to demonstrate my anger"
 
The brilliant writer Suzanne Moore and I go back a long way. I first met her when she was a young single mother living in a council flat; she took me out to interview me about my novel Ambition (republished by Corvus Books this spring, since you ask) for dear dead City Limits magazine. "I've got an entertaining budget of £12.50!" she said proudly. "Sod that, we're having lobster and champagne at Frederick's and I'm paying," I told her. Half a bottle of Bolly later, she looked at me with faraway eyes: "Ooo, I could get to like this…" And so she did.
:facepalm:
 
Without being offensive towards people with mental health issues; are Bindel, Burchill and Moore fucking nuts?
It's not my specialist subject but I do know that Bindel has a long-running issue with trans people - well, women at least - for which she's been regularly and deservedly slated in the past.
 
"I'm passionate about x subject so to demonstrate it I will use words that are offensive to y and z to demonstrate my anger"

P.S. Please buy my new book. It's available in all crap booksellers and a few of the better ones who don't realise how appalling it is. Even if you're illiterate, read. Just read. And give me some money. Thank you...
 
Laura's chum, blogger and Independent columnist Stavri yesterday.
And the commentariat inevitably close ranks, because Moore's hate speech is apparently somehow OK and she's a victim here.
Today.
Yes, I'm on holiday but Julie fucking Burchill made me so cross I had to blog on how inevitable it was
Do these bubble clowns not get that they are the commentariat, part of the self-orbiting problem. She'd chew her legs off for a guardian gig.

stoopit question really
 
Do these bubble clowns not get that they are the commentariat, part of the self-orbiting problem. She'd chew her legs off for a guardian gig.

No...but to be fair, that's not only a failing among self-styled middle-class radical frauds...I sometimes find myself berating the failings of various hopeless drunks I happen to know...often in the small hours as I crack open another Special Brew.
 
Little over 2 hours and 630 comments on Burchill's piece...which features ads from Sky broadband, Direct Line and American Express Gold cards.

Odd....where're the ads for Lidl and Primark? So many of the comments are for people claiming to be working class feminists.
 
Little over 2 hours and 630 comments on Burchill's piece...which features ads from Sky broadband, Direct Line and American Express Gold cards.

Odd....where're the ads for Lidl and Primark? So many of the comments are for people claiming to be working class feminists.

Ads are specific to the person viewing the page, so in actual fact those adverts say more about you than the people leaving comments.

When I go to that page I get adverts for donkey jackets, hobnailed boots, tripe, Wonga loans and union lines:
 
It's going to bite them in the arse though, there wasn't a trans-mob/cabal - but there will be now.

"I'm passionate about x subject so to demonstrate it I will use words that are offensive to y and z to demonstrate my anger"

tbh there was and is a very vocal trans lobby.
 
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