Yup, this exactly. There were plenty of working class kids who left school on the day of those anti-war marches, but it's funny how it's the ones who went to private school who end up making careers of the back of their "radicalism".
Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags
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Yup, this exactly. There were plenty of working class kids who left school on the day of those anti-war marches, but it's funny how it's the ones who went to private school who end up making careers of the back of their "radicalism".
The EP bit was a reference to 'below'...'History from Below' being very much his schtick. I was disputing that her support was from below in that sense ie. that she possesses a significant working class following...significant in the sense of 'any'.
Shit. Just read that again. In case it seems otherwise, I should state I'm a big fan of EP.
Oh fuck me. Now this..
She's clarifying what she means by 'slut'. That's not a coincidence. Her twitter output now seems to be largely dictated by criticism from this thread.
She's clarifying what she means by 'slut'. That's not a coincidence. Her twitter output now seems to be largely dictated by criticism from this thread.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
The internet can bring out the nasty side of people 
lauriepenny I'm sorry you've received threats from that odious right-wing shit.
I guess I've been lucky in my internet dealings and other than a couple of occasions on here, urban has been a safe place to express opinions and for the large part a place of equality.
lauriepenny I'm sorry you've received threats from that odious right-wing shit. I guess I've been lucky in my internet dealings and other than a couple of occasions on here, urban has been a safe place to express opinions and for the large part a place of equality.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
If she is reading the thread, she might be lurking as a guest - she hasn't logged in since the 5th.
Well, I'd guess she is. If you look back, the reaction to her talk consisted to a large extent in whether she was overstating the level of misogynist abuse she gets and her questionable use of 'slut' and her dubious association of slut with 'working-class'...which was probably just a piece of poor judgement and general ignorance. I just think those last two tweets were in response. If not, then a remarkable coincidence.
It's like she's being flown by remote control...a kinda drone.
Let's see...
Laurie...Owen Jones just said your mam's a fat cow and you're an upper class fraud.
Now I'll sit back and watch the 'new left' rip itself to bits.
Superdupastupor
fun to funky
I had a 'bed protest' that day. Wish i'd gone in- sounded great fun- the Head and and Assistant Heads tried to block all the school gates thus ensuring that everyone leapt at the chance for a mass break out and march on the US embassy.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Must be lurking then - how else did she know about the speculation that Paul Mason and Owen Jones researched her shit talk for her?
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
True in every word.
No decent person will condone threats and abuse for the sake of it, but using other people's efforts and risks taken by them as a career move and dressing that up in some 'Prada-Meinhof' radical chic to hide the careerism and self-promotion frankly turns my stomach.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
That, and the very human tendency to get pushed to extremes in arguments like this. Identity politics co-opted equality struggles and the reaction has, all too often, been to dismiss the struggles themselves not just the wanky, divisive approaches to them. The serious left has a decent analysis, but it's not always obvious.
Hang on...so out the blue, she happens to recall an article from 2010? Why exactly...unless it's to counter accusations on here about her association of 'slut' and 'working class; and I quote..LP:" The idea of slut pride is also about working-class pride."
To which..the reponse was:
So why does she suddenly tweet what she did? Together with the thing from 'Don't get me started' to prove she's a victim who needs to reclaim the net?
Don't get me wrong, I fuckin love coincidences with probabilities of astronomical proportions, and I'm off my fuckin head, but if that's 'navel gazey', I'm a fuckin cheese sandwich. Why else does she tweet that from nowhere? She must lurk here.
She doesn't need pushing...she trades on those extremes. It's her bread and butter.
And as for the 'serious left', its analysis is decent because its analysis is grounded in the shitty, 'crooked timber', desperate, red in tooth and claw nature of humanity; not some fucked-up ideological, I wanna Guardian column and impress my peers theorising.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Let's recap. LP on activism against education cuts, a cardboard-cut of all the people mentioned.
Asians (all second-generation immigrants?) who are afraid of displeasing their parents.
"All that aspiration was pretty much for nothing when there are no jobs," says Amit, 18, a computer science student from Medway. "This fight is so much more important than blind careerism. Just don't tell my parents I said that."
Former traditional left politicos who think the radical movement is 'everywhere'.
A similar view comes from Aaron Peters, 26, a former member of David Miliband's Labour leadership campaign team with a tendency to pull an Incredible Hulk act when out on protests. "Parliamentary politics is basically over - it's dead," he says. ... Peters is quietly informed that he is, in fact, wearing a T-shirt from Topman. He immediately rips it off and stands shirtless on Oxford Street, stating that, even in sub-zero temperatures, one does not need exploitatively made clothes if one has the right ideals. Peters and Beach are the sort of leader that this staunchly leaderless movement would otherwise have. ... "They said it couldn't happen; they said that students could never mobilise like this," says Peters who, thankfully, was fully dressed for the visit to UCL by Cruddas. "Well, now we're everywhere. This is just the beginning."
Immature people.
""It's snowing!" says one of the students, interrupting a debate on police brutality to rush over to the window. "It's snowing!" These members of the so-called lost generation press their faces against the glass, or hurry towards the doors to go outside and catch fat, frozen snowflakes on their tongues. These young people have been radicalised extremely quickly."
Swappies who shout through loudspeakers for too long.
“I object to politicians using the term parliamentary democracy, because I don't think we have one any more," says Ben Beach, 21, an architecture student who has been awake for 28 hours when we first meet. “No one has the balls to stand up and represent the people they're meant to represent. We're about to be made to pay for a financial crisis that we had no part in creating. Education and welfare are being destroyed to pay for a £1.4trn bank bailout that wasn't our fault." Ben Beach is the Justin Bieber of the new left: a baby-faced riot messiah from Bethnal Green in east London with a tendency to hog the megaphone at demonstrations."
Aristocrats.
"Eventually a three-piece suit is procured by way of a young man whom I'll call "Peregrine", a barman and student at a local college who also happens - he reveals shyly in the third week - to be an aristocrat, which is why he is always asking everyone for money. Outside the Brown event, Beach gets a phone call from Peregrine. "Um, Ben, you may want to check out that waistcoat before you go past security, OK?" Peregrine says. "I think there's some, like, acid in the lining."
Farmowners.
"In the occupied college building, education is not a commodity, but an intimate weapon of social change, and Sarah seems to understand that better than anyone else. She grew up on a working farm in South Wales; she wears sensible fleeces and non-designer spectacles.
Only gradually, after spending time with the occupiers, do you realise that it is this soft-spoken geography student, not the more dramatic male activists, who is running the show, organising the meetings, making sure the younger ones are listened to. "This is like a family," is how Sarah puts it on the blog. "That's the beauty of it. It's the sense that anyone can speak and be listened to; like any of these people I didn't know last week would come to my rescue if I needed it." ...
That night, on 9 December, in front of a line of mounted police, as tens of thousands of protesters surge past the barriers into Parliament Square, I find myself standing next to Sarah, watching her throw up her hands to protect herself and others from a hail of batons. Sarah's sensible fleece is flecked with blood, but she stands firm until the police run their horses into the crowd, pushing the protesters into a pen with nowhere to run. We stand until we are forced to the ground, crushed under a writhing, kicking heap of bodies. I grab Sarah's arm and we go down together."
Foreign fees-paying (sub-text: rich) art students (from Greece with a thirst for ...
)."A young art student from Athens - 22-year-old Margarita, dressed in denim, and a whizz with video installations - was persuaded to lead the British protesters in a chant of solidarity. She shouted a line in Greek and the Brits - the loudest of them a squatter with a thick Glasgow accent - chanted it back as best they could. On the long journey home, Margarita was asked precisely what they'd been shouting. "Oh, it's just something we say in Athens when the police beat us," she said, smiling. “It translates something like, 'Cops, cops, you're all murderers, we hope you die.'" Members of the "media relations working group" turned pale."
Shy (cowardly?/timid?) non-politicals who - in under two weeks - "profess" "libertarian tendencies".
"Techie Sam wasn't political two weeks earlier. A shy, stocky young man who looks older than 22 and professes libertarian tendencies, he got involved after his girlfriend, Jenny, was caught in the front line as police launched a horse-charge against student protesters outside 10 Downing Street on 24 November. After Jenny was trampled and traumatised, Techie Sam realised that "peaceful protest was no longer an option. I feared for my safety if I dared to go on the streets, so I decided to offer my particular skill set to the movement and to help in the way I know how." He now finds himself working so many hours a day that he's taken to sleeping in a roll of blankets under his desk in the room at UCL."
Working-class (male - check, older - check) that love how middle-classes "really care"
"Jack, 30, a mature student from Gateshead. "When we bailed out the banks, young people realised that capitalism had screwed us all. But after Millbank, the possibility of resistance became real."...
They come from all over the country, from across the world, and from different backgrounds, defying every stereotype of the privileged, white, middle-class, male student radical. "I left school at 16 and worked in a carpet warehouse, and my political involvement was community volunteering - the 1980s recession never really ended in the north-east," says Jack. “Until Millbank, I used to think that student politics was just a lot of liberal wankers, frankly. But this lot really care about workers - they care about ordinary people, they're liaising with unions and community organisers. It's not just about student fees. It's about fighting the cuts as a whole, and insisting that education, job security and welfare support are every person's right."
All mobilised by the progressive-stack of consensus decision making (voting is bad, hand gestures and autonomous working groups WTF? good)
"Instead, the UCL occupation, and the movement as a whole, pursues a policy of consensus-based decision-making, an anarchist organising structure that gained credibility with the rise of green protest. Under this system, which involves hand gestures and autonomous working groups, there is no central leadership to report to. This means that everyone is allowed the chance to speak, and that the voices of women and younger pupils are given priority. It also means that direct action can be effected quickly, without any need for the bitter, arthritic infighting that blighted the student protests of the 1960s and, more recently, the Stop the War movement."
Note how that clashes that in the LSE lecture LP was saying women weren't given an equal voice, weren't given priority in the education movement or 'Occupy' or anywhere.
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2011/01/student-protesters-young
Hmmm....
Possibly...and I'm relatively new to this...but the more you read, the more obscene it all appears...and that's disregarding the patently obvious issue of the subject of the thread. Apart from all else, she so fuckin symptomatic of the problems with the left and the 'left liberal media' that I can't help it. Like I say, she's a symptom, the rancid boil. I'm not saying she's the pathogen; that was contracted 50..60 years back.
You think she has any redeeming features?
And shouldn't any decent, self and socially aware person be 'obseessed' with what she represents?
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
The decent analysis frequently suffers in translation, is what I'm saying. Stooping to her inane level, mirror image, baby/bathwater, yada yada.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Sunny Hundal is fighting the class war
We can win the ‘class war’
Sunny Hundal is fighting the 'class war'.
We can win the ‘class war’
Sunny Hundal is fighting the 'class war'.
No major diversion, but her innane level seems to be gaining traction...New Statesman, Indy, Guardian, Radio 4. So not 'stooping' effectively amounts to condoning the entire package. The alternative is to give up, piss all over my entire life and accept that she is 'the left'. Fuck that.
" His Labour party have to appeal to voters who are worried about the national debt."
Yeah...that's me. I can't sleep at night because my worries about the national debt eat at my soul. Sometimes at the end of the month, when I can't afford the petrol and I'm putting two hours on my day by getting the bus, it's not the waste of my time and the weight of mortality that eats at me...it's the national debt.
Sunny Hundal could stick his head and both hands in a 50 kilo sack of chickpeas and my girl's goldfish would still have more claim to a finger on the pulse.
Yeah...that's me. I can't sleep at night because my worries about the national debt eat at my soul. Sometimes at the end of the month, when I can't afford the petrol and I'm putting two hours on my day by getting the bus, it's not the waste of my time and the weight of mortality that eats at me...it's the national debt.
Sunny Hundal could stick his head and both hands in a 50 kilo sack of chickpeas and my girl's goldfish would still have more claim to a finger on the pulse.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
"Not stooping" means applying a decent political analysis rather than becoming her "mirror image" and throwing the anti-sexist "baby out with the bathwater" of identity politics.
ie there is no need to trivialise or deny the existence of the unacceptable abuse that is routinely dished out to 'minority' writers in order to criticise the way she abuses the over-riding class privilege that she cannot bring herself to admit that she has.
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
Again..no argument. So where am I doing that? I take the position that I'm trivialising the worst excesses of a drama queen who extrapolates admittedly heinous abuse to paint all criticism in the same light.
But, apart from the one instance, which I reposted and condemned, I'm relying on her word that its a constant stream.
Here's the thing, re abuse: any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts, general purpose loons and 10 a penny meatheads giving off far more than 'online abuse'. Seriously, I fuckin laugh at 'online abuse'. I've had a baseball bat and a machete near the door for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, I'm massive and fairly handy. To quote Hank Scorpio, "walk a mile in my moccasins"...then give me some schlum about 'virtual threats'. I've got 4 kids. I'm never at peace while one of them is out the house. I live in a fucked up dystopian pile of bullshit. Seriously, call me on it...come and visit, but don't tell me I belittle threats...I belittle fuckin tourists who play it for advantage and credibility.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
What? No it doesn't. What fucking rubbish.
Doesn't it? Where do you live? 50 odd houses down my street. 2 stabbings, 1 rape and two burned out cars since Xmas. Never seen a single copper. They turn up in a transit mob handed and piss off ASAP.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
I'm not accusing you of anything. I am answering points you raise in response to my posts.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
You can't ever walk down the street to the shops without being threatened by smackheads and loons? Bollocks. Shut up.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Well, we fucking do. Where do you live?
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