Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
There is a consensus.
Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags
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fractionMan
Custom Title
Graham speaks on the subject
Does he not mean cheap (possibly market-bought) perfume/deodorant? That's what I reckon anyway.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Oh yes, he's a complete picture of health. What a judgemental arsehole.
Isn't it just - I'd never be so tasteless as to wish cancer or AIDS or somesuch on someone, but given those afflictions happen to people every day then surely it'd be a mercy if a worthless piece of crap like Aaronovitch was struck down in the place of a decent person. Shitehill FTW.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
What makes these 'commentators' think they can pass judgements on people like this? It's not journalism - there's no story or news - and it's incredibly crass at best. So what if people live on Sighthill (probably less now the flats next to the railway have gone).
I'd rather have people from Sighthill next door rather than Aaronvitch any day. Wanker that he is.
So would I. And he slagged off Oldham - Doubtless without ever having set foot in the town. As you say , it's not journalism, it's just some trumpet who's made me as angry as he's made you - I'd love to put him on the spot and ask him how he can write off whole communities - You never get the chance though. Check out the link below though, it'll make you laugh if nowt else.
www.gairspace.org.uk/media/thoreau.swf
Aaronovitch clumsily fitted the toy soldiers that fell out of his botty in a state of near asphyxiation with miners lamps in a doomed attempt to pass them off as potholers who'd innocently taken a wrong turn and been overcome by methane. We know the truth though, Aaronovitch, we saw you. Dirty bastard. Allegedly.
Riklet
procrastinación
i know commenting on her personal habbits has been at times extremely tasteless in this thread, but fellow cmmdes n cmbbes will see that a recent blog reveals an upgrade from the humble roll-up to the tailor made.
slowly but surely the deceit is dragged into the light, where the shadows of privilege are laid bare.
slowly but surely the deceit is dragged into the light, where the shadows of privilege are laid bare.
i know commenting on her personal habbits has been at times extremely tasteless in this thread, but fellow cmmdes n cmbbes will see that a recent blog reveals an upgrade from the humble roll-up to the tailor made.
slowly but surely the deceit is dragged into the light, where the shadows of privilege are laid bare.
PFWC smoke sterling superkings anyway.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
malboro lights I'll be bound. truly the cunts choice, that or the hard to find lucky strikes
Camel?
I used to smoke the full-strength ones in Russia because I could afford them there, and I wasn't sure sometimes if they were counterfeit. Lucky Strikes are for hipster scum, aren't they.
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
A proper smoke for proper people.
Especially the old-school unfiltered in the foil crush packs.
Mmmmmm, Camels...
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Luckies are big in america but yes, here they are for cunts.
Malboro now clocking in at near 6-7 quid for a twenty box are clearly the smoke for people who have too much money.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
That's the most disarmingly honest OKCupid profile ever.
Ye gods, I always thought their smoke reeked of camel dung and wet wool, thanks a bundle for the reminder.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
Don't get the humpYe gods, I always thought their smoke reeked of camel dung, thanks a bundle for the reminder.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
i smoke(d) luckies
please report to your nearest re-education centr for immediate reproletrianisation
weepiper
I fix the machines that fight climate change
All PFWC women I know smoke Lambert and Butler menthol. You may laugh at the menthol but it's true
Proper Fucking Working Class? I thought it was just FWC.
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
After the dust had settled more than a dozen sex offenders were removed from Paulsgrove and, as far as I can tell, placed in adult-only council B&Bs and 'tighter' monitoring (never wholly explained), the New Statesman gave over its central essay (2500 words) to analyse the wider political and social trends. The result:
What are we doing to our children? Parents dress as teenagers while pushing their toddlers into trashy adulthood.
In the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, there was a baby in a buggy. About nine months old, she had a rounded, contented appearance of the kind that makes people smile. I was sitting nearby and I smiled, but then suddenly stopped. I had noticed a heavy gold bracelet on her fat wrist. The next thing I noticed was an earring in her pierced ear. The baby's charm had gone, to be replaced by my revulsion. It was a sense of prematurely and unnecessarily defiled nature. The baby had been pushed, before her time, into trashy adulthood. She had had no choice in the matter. And then, on television, I saw footage of the anti-paedophile demonstrations in Portsmouth. A woman was asked why they were hounding these people. 'They are not people, they are animals,' she replied. 'And we put down animals normally.'
There was a picture in the papers the next day of a small boy holding a sign. It read: 'Don't house them, HANG THEM.' Most of the women on these demonstrations seemed to have brought their children along. Some of the news footage showed impromptu classes forming in which the children were taught to chant anti-paedophile slogans. One little girl was listening while her mother was being interviewed. She was around nine or ten. She wore large, gold earrings, and her face was heavily made up.
These days, people don't like to be told what to do; they hate the idea of any imposed morality or agreed standard of behaviour. Yet they wish to retain the capacity for moral outrage. So they teach their children the language of hate and vengeance, they dress them like tarts and they take them out to hound paedophiles - sometimes to death. They also hound innocents whom they mistakenly take to be paedophiles. It does not seem to bother them.
This recent hysteria, prompted by the News of the World's campaign to name and shame paedophiles, is indistinguishable from a medieval witch-hunt. It is no good saying that paedophiles exist, whereas witches do not, because, to the medieval mind, witches certainly existed. They also represented a uniquely threatening incarnation of evil. So, if someone were a witch, normal restraints could - should - be removed. She should be killed. Paedophiles are the new witches. Confronted with a paedophile, outraged citizens can abandon normal restraints. Demonstrations are organised, houses are attacked, cars are burned. Who can doubt that, if the NoW campaign had continued, one or more paedophiles would have been lynched by the mob? [...]
From Rwanda and Cambodia to the streets of London, terrible things are done by terrible people that do not attract the attention of the mob. Where were the demonstrations in Eltham against those who were known locally to have murdered Stephen Lawrence? But murderers, rapists, muggers, the agents of genocide and tyranny, are not hounded by the angered masses. Only paedophiles are hunted down. They are also, it is said, isolated in prisons because other prisoners hold them in particular contempt. Paedophiles are the outcasts among the outcasts, the untouchables. Why should this be? What is it about paedophilia that can unite the mob and provide a focus for the desire for vengeance? The answer lies in our peculiarly exalted idea of childhood. And this, in turn, is the product of a depraved and deracinated culture.
People know there is no moral consensus, and they resent any suggestion that there should be one. In the present political climate, they know also that their passing moods - sometimes glorified as 'the will of the people' - are of lasting political significance. This is a recipe for mob rule, and it is a direct product of new Labour's supine populism; government by focus group and by tabloid headlines is a not entirely polite way of describing mob rule.
In such a climate, where people feel they have power but lack any strong feelings about how it should be deployed, they will seize on the easiest and most vulnerable target. And what, in a fragmented society, is the one good on which we can all agree? Childhood. Childhood becomes the one communal good, and its abuse, therefore, is the one agreed evil.
In this, the anti-paedophile mob is encouraged by the infantilising effects of moronic mass entertainment, from soap operas to Arnold Schwarzenegger films. These serve to identify the easy excitements and unthinking wonder of childhood as some kind of human ideal. Equally, the sentimentalism of the mass media in an inanely populist political climate finds its quickest, simplest expression in the glorification of the child. All these media say the same thing - the child is the icon of virtue for a society that does not wish to grow up.
What is deeply wrong about this is that childhood is meaningless if it is not a preparation for adulthood. Childhood is wonderful not because it is a thing in itself, but precisely because it is a state of innocent wonder at the complex human and natural world into which the child is to be inducted. But if we find our only conception of virtue in the child, then there will be no adult world into which it can be inducted. Human life becomes a falling-off, a decline into the empty misery of adulthood. The child is effectively told that it is only worthwhile to remain a child. Growing up is pure loss.
But what of this other, apparently contradictory, phenomenon? That baby had been pushed into premature adulthood, and that girl on the Portsmouth demonstration was pierced and primped like a tart. [...]
Meanwhile, from the other direction, adults are dressing younger. [...] Old women grotesquely ape the sports styles of the young. There is now no way of dressing in a distinctively old manner, because it is unacceptable to be old. Oldness is not a condition that can be openly embraced, and dignity is a forgotten virtue.
Both impulses - sexualised children and the rejuvenated old - seem to be converging on some mid-point where childish sensation-seeking and adult sexuality can be merged. We want sex and we want childhood, and so we create the perpetually randy toddler. What we do not want are clear distinctions, rites of passage, a hierarchy of human development. We want everything to be the same. And yet, driven by some essential need for evil, we also want the paedophile as villain, so that we can pretend we really do think that childhood is different.
This is an aspect of a more general desire to eradicate boundaries. What follows, I warn you, may seem like a digression, but I don't think it is. The summer sales were still on when I was in the Bluewater shopping centre. In the House of Fraser men's department, all the sale goods had been hung on a long line of racks. This is the centre's upmarket store, so the usual suspects were listed on the labels [...] All the clothes, whatever their label, were the same - the same baggy, long-sleeved T-shirts; the same tight, short-sleeved shirts; the same semi-transparent sweaters; the same khakis and jeans; the same short, zipper jackets.
[...] on that clothes rail, there really was no choice. Fashion houses, in spite of the oddities we may see on the catwalks, cannot actually afford the risk of offering us genuine choices. They all sniff the same perfumed wind, and then they all produce the same kinds of things because that is what they think the market wants. Meanwhile, at the other end of the process, the consumer looks at the magazines and decides to buy those things. Any company that tried to do something radically different would be cutting itself off from the mass market. That is, after all, what fashion is - a kind of uniform. To be fashionable means to conform. [...]
What are we doing to our children? Parents dress as teenagers while pushing their toddlers into trashy adulthood.
In the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, there was a baby in a buggy. About nine months old, she had a rounded, contented appearance of the kind that makes people smile. I was sitting nearby and I smiled, but then suddenly stopped. I had noticed a heavy gold bracelet on her fat wrist. The next thing I noticed was an earring in her pierced ear. The baby's charm had gone, to be replaced by my revulsion. It was a sense of prematurely and unnecessarily defiled nature. The baby had been pushed, before her time, into trashy adulthood. She had had no choice in the matter. And then, on television, I saw footage of the anti-paedophile demonstrations in Portsmouth. A woman was asked why they were hounding these people. 'They are not people, they are animals,' she replied. 'And we put down animals normally.'
There was a picture in the papers the next day of a small boy holding a sign. It read: 'Don't house them, HANG THEM.' Most of the women on these demonstrations seemed to have brought their children along. Some of the news footage showed impromptu classes forming in which the children were taught to chant anti-paedophile slogans. One little girl was listening while her mother was being interviewed. She was around nine or ten. She wore large, gold earrings, and her face was heavily made up.
These days, people don't like to be told what to do; they hate the idea of any imposed morality or agreed standard of behaviour. Yet they wish to retain the capacity for moral outrage. So they teach their children the language of hate and vengeance, they dress them like tarts and they take them out to hound paedophiles - sometimes to death. They also hound innocents whom they mistakenly take to be paedophiles. It does not seem to bother them.
This recent hysteria, prompted by the News of the World's campaign to name and shame paedophiles, is indistinguishable from a medieval witch-hunt. It is no good saying that paedophiles exist, whereas witches do not, because, to the medieval mind, witches certainly existed. They also represented a uniquely threatening incarnation of evil. So, if someone were a witch, normal restraints could - should - be removed. She should be killed. Paedophiles are the new witches. Confronted with a paedophile, outraged citizens can abandon normal restraints. Demonstrations are organised, houses are attacked, cars are burned. Who can doubt that, if the NoW campaign had continued, one or more paedophiles would have been lynched by the mob? [...]
From Rwanda and Cambodia to the streets of London, terrible things are done by terrible people that do not attract the attention of the mob. Where were the demonstrations in Eltham against those who were known locally to have murdered Stephen Lawrence? But murderers, rapists, muggers, the agents of genocide and tyranny, are not hounded by the angered masses. Only paedophiles are hunted down. They are also, it is said, isolated in prisons because other prisoners hold them in particular contempt. Paedophiles are the outcasts among the outcasts, the untouchables. Why should this be? What is it about paedophilia that can unite the mob and provide a focus for the desire for vengeance? The answer lies in our peculiarly exalted idea of childhood. And this, in turn, is the product of a depraved and deracinated culture.
People know there is no moral consensus, and they resent any suggestion that there should be one. In the present political climate, they know also that their passing moods - sometimes glorified as 'the will of the people' - are of lasting political significance. This is a recipe for mob rule, and it is a direct product of new Labour's supine populism; government by focus group and by tabloid headlines is a not entirely polite way of describing mob rule.
In such a climate, where people feel they have power but lack any strong feelings about how it should be deployed, they will seize on the easiest and most vulnerable target. And what, in a fragmented society, is the one good on which we can all agree? Childhood. Childhood becomes the one communal good, and its abuse, therefore, is the one agreed evil.
In this, the anti-paedophile mob is encouraged by the infantilising effects of moronic mass entertainment, from soap operas to Arnold Schwarzenegger films. These serve to identify the easy excitements and unthinking wonder of childhood as some kind of human ideal. Equally, the sentimentalism of the mass media in an inanely populist political climate finds its quickest, simplest expression in the glorification of the child. All these media say the same thing - the child is the icon of virtue for a society that does not wish to grow up.
What is deeply wrong about this is that childhood is meaningless if it is not a preparation for adulthood. Childhood is wonderful not because it is a thing in itself, but precisely because it is a state of innocent wonder at the complex human and natural world into which the child is to be inducted. But if we find our only conception of virtue in the child, then there will be no adult world into which it can be inducted. Human life becomes a falling-off, a decline into the empty misery of adulthood. The child is effectively told that it is only worthwhile to remain a child. Growing up is pure loss.
But what of this other, apparently contradictory, phenomenon? That baby had been pushed into premature adulthood, and that girl on the Portsmouth demonstration was pierced and primped like a tart. [...]
Meanwhile, from the other direction, adults are dressing younger. [...] Old women grotesquely ape the sports styles of the young. There is now no way of dressing in a distinctively old manner, because it is unacceptable to be old. Oldness is not a condition that can be openly embraced, and dignity is a forgotten virtue.
Both impulses - sexualised children and the rejuvenated old - seem to be converging on some mid-point where childish sensation-seeking and adult sexuality can be merged. We want sex and we want childhood, and so we create the perpetually randy toddler. What we do not want are clear distinctions, rites of passage, a hierarchy of human development. We want everything to be the same. And yet, driven by some essential need for evil, we also want the paedophile as villain, so that we can pretend we really do think that childhood is different.
This is an aspect of a more general desire to eradicate boundaries. What follows, I warn you, may seem like a digression, but I don't think it is. The summer sales were still on when I was in the Bluewater shopping centre. In the House of Fraser men's department, all the sale goods had been hung on a long line of racks. This is the centre's upmarket store, so the usual suspects were listed on the labels [...] All the clothes, whatever their label, were the same - the same baggy, long-sleeved T-shirts; the same tight, short-sleeved shirts; the same semi-transparent sweaters; the same khakis and jeans; the same short, zipper jackets.
[...] on that clothes rail, there really was no choice. Fashion houses, in spite of the oddities we may see on the catwalks, cannot actually afford the risk of offering us genuine choices. They all sniff the same perfumed wind, and then they all produce the same kinds of things because that is what they think the market wants. Meanwhile, at the other end of the process, the consumer looks at the magazines and decides to buy those things. Any company that tried to do something radically different would be cutting itself off from the mass market. That is, after all, what fashion is - a kind of uniform. To be fashionable means to conform. [...]
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
i just multi vommed.
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