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    Lazy Llama

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

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Human beings have a refreshing tendency to pursue truth and excellence in the face of staggering hurdles – and for every professional hack who resigns him or herself to a living as a greased gear in the corporate press factory, there is another for whom the challenge of carving out a space for honest, rigorous reportage and inspiring, imaginative wordcraft is a reason to get up and put the coffee on of a morning.
Not that it isn’t a bloody pain sometimes. Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism.
This might be less nauseating if it wasn't obvious that she considers herself to be the embodiment of honest journalism.
 
Like she says, they've worn out their trainers from running away from the police. They can't get out. So they live off a handful of rice krispies a day and the rubbish piles up and up. I believe the VC had much the same problem in the cu chi tunnels in 'Nam.


I think she thinks she's a character from a Martin Millar novel from twenty years ago.
 
I was bewildered, and heartbroken. More than any other print journalist working in the mainstream media in Britain at that point, I understood what these people were trying to do. I was the same age, I had read the same books, I went to the same meetings, I declined to name names when to do so might have endangered activists, I stepped outside my job description to report faithfully on protests and incidents of police violence that the rest of the press ignored. None of this, by the way required any special cookies for effort - but I thought it might at least be enough to prevent me getting thrown out of a party by drunk hippies.

'I' appears no less than eight times in this paragraph! What sort of World Historical Narcissist do you have to be to produce this pile of bobbins? Laurie looks into the fathomless depths of world history and all she sees is me! me! me! me! me! For a women concerned with the issues of eating disorders it's a curious facts that her prose is such a surefire way to expel your last meal.
 
If anyone's interested, Penny has written a guest blog over at Warren Ellis's site...


Nonetheless, just after midnight, a man with dreadlocks who I had never met before in my life started jabbing a less than entirely sober finger in my face, calling me scum, asking how I dared to speak on behalf of others, and attempting to assault me gently with a rusty bicycle. I was moved by the idiosyncracy of this attack, but far more perturbed by the fact that five or six comrades, people I had stood beside as police horses charged into lines of protesters in Parliament square, people I would have trusted if not with my life, then at least with my dignity – they turned away, and they pretended not to see.



It goes on (and on and on) here: www.warrenellis.com/?p=13926

So i rolled away the stone....
 
View attachment 18244

I'll just leave this here shall I.
And guess what, it was the subs fault...again. Only problem is that her defence leaves her open to the exact same charge. Her defence is that the subs changed her inaccurate quote to another inaccurate quote. This is verging on homophobia.

edit:and even better she then goes on to undermine her original defence by claiming the inaccurate quote was a result of 'cutting' - odd sort of cutting that adds something to an article.
 
And guess what, it was the subs fault...again. Only problem is that her defence leaves her open to the exact same charge. Her defence is that the subs changed her inaccurate quote to another inaccurate quote. This is verging on homophobia.

edit:and even better she then goes on to undermine her original defence by claiming the inaccurate quote was a result of 'cutting' - odd sort of cutting that adds something to an article.
And it don't stop there!
The new statesman do not fabricate quotes and neither do I; if you choose to recall it differently, or feel that you have been misrepresented, that’s your prerogative, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t waste energy trying to imply that I’m somehow not behaving professionally.

Dear Laurie, if you like Orwell so much why don't you go live there.
notes on nationalism said:
Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.
 
I see that LibDemmy lawyer, Staggers columnist & member of the twitterati David Allen Green has retreated a little from his earlier, somewhat intemperate, defence of LP in the comments section following the second part of that blog.
 
I've got plenty of criticisms of Laurie, but this Sophie doesn't half make a mountain out of a molehill, particularly as the quote wasn't attributed to her by name anyway. Anyone can make an honest mistake
 
I've got plenty of criticisms of Laurie, but this Sophie doesn't half make a mountain out of a molehill, particularly as the quote wasn't attributed to her by name anyway. Anyone can make an honest mistake
Most of the substance had nothing to do with being misquoted.

And there's a fuck of a lot of history there. Largely based on similar shitness from la Penny. The fucking conversation she misquoted/misreported/just plain didn't understand, was based on similar shitness from her, ffs.

I have had some sympathy for her, being a similarly clueless middle-class twat myself. But this is a lot more Hari than Jones now.
 
Blog arguing that Penny isn't as bad as Hari, so if she comes clean now then the matter should be dropped: http://www.kernelmag.com/editors-blog/1868/laurie-penny-johann-haris-final-victim/ Needless to say, DAG has endorsed it.

The author touches on Penny's background but swiftly moves on. He doesn't seem to realise that people dislike her because her public persona is completely contrived and she would never act on her own rhetoric, not because she mangles the odd quote (although that doesn't help).

There are some funny comments. Nic Lezard says "Anyone insulting her will have to get past me first." Didn't Penny say a few weeks ago she wasn't a damsel in distress?

Edit: And Penny has tweeted this out of the blue:

Someday, maybe when I'm less under attack, I'll write about being queer and polyamorous, and what that means for me politically. But not now

Poor Penny!
 
What are your criticisms of red?

Similar to those already recounted (at length) on this thread. Including making shit up (the youth spontaneously breaking into the internationale was a cracker). But also in her claims to speak for a generation, her failure to recognise or be open about her own privilege, her egotism, etc.
 
That's a fairly reasoned post....hmmm...I think butchers is right above, I smell blood...she's in real trouble this time.
 
anyone know what the robert fisk article in private eye that jeremy dunns mentions in the comments on the article above was about?
 
He claims to have been living with her for a year. Is he not already getting some?
 
And guess what, it was the subs fault...again. Only problem is that her defence leaves her open to the exact same charge. Her defence is that the subs changed her inaccurate quote to another inaccurate quote. This is verging on homophobia.

edit:and even better she then goes on to undermine her original defence by claiming the inaccurate quote was a result of 'cutting' - odd sort of cutting that adds something to an article.

Funny thing is (seeing as I happen to be a paid scribbler as well), is that it definitely ISN'T a sub-editor's job to to change quotes or add portions of text that aren't there. It simply isn't their job to do that. At all.

If the editor or sub-editor of a big name publication wants something in a piece altered or replaced then they'll punt it back to the original writer (as a rule), having pointed out what they want changed or added, where they want it put and so on. If they want a piece completely rewritten then they'll usually summon a rewrite bod and get it done that way.

As a rule, mere sub-editors DON'T replace quotes with other quotes, they DON'T add bits that weren't previously there, they DON'T do full rewrites and 'cutting' is exactly that as they selectively prune a piece by removing small parts (and only where it enhances the general quality of the piece and/or to fit the space allocated on the page/pages where it's to be printed). 'Cutting' DOES NOT mean doing what Penny Dreadful uses as her prime defence of 'If in doubt, somebody else screwed up my piece.'

So, having seemingly made it a regular practice to not check her facts, ignore the ones that don't suit a previously-held position and her outright falsification of sections of copy (for example, at the porn awards she attended she claimed in her piece to have struck up a conversation with Anna Span, only for Ms Span to raise on her Twitter page the small fact of not having actually attended the event at which Penny Dreadful claimed to have talked with her) she also makes it a regular feature to lie about doing all of the above when she gets caught out and foists the blame on the non-existent professional incompetence of a (possibly also equally non-existent) sub-editor who, despite their clearly being unfit to hold their post, still miraculously remains in the job in spite of their alleged serial uselessness.
 
He claims to have been living with her for a year. Is he not already getting some?

Nah, she's just one of a long chain of lodgers he's had over the years to subsidise his drinking habits (he likes to think he's a genteel alkie living in genteel squalor). If he can get it up, he probably bangs his hand.
 
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