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

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to a degree I sympathise with 'who cares', but as I posted earlier this is the future of what will happen to protests etc here if writers/thinkers/movers and shakers aren't kept under control or anonymous/non-celebrity.
Harris was as one of the organisers behind the first Occupy Wall Street street demo and was part of the meetings to set up a Park and inform the media they were doing so in a careful pre-arranged fashion - although one freelancer for the New York Times lost/non-renewed her contract there because she was seen as non-objective too pro-OWS.
Of course lots of ordinary people also started just coming in aswell and it had something of a life of its own. He for various reasons became something of an important figure as a spokesperson/writer for the 'radical' pro-resist the police eviction by force wing.

To such an extent that he appeared on platforms about the future
See here with Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer and others:



Very keen on exciting demos and exciting actions, he fell out with Henwood and others when the email came out about the $5000 speaking fee.

But LP and the New Inquiry haven't broken with him and he and they are all part of this burgeoning write and publish left-wing critique on why OWS went wrong/ tackle the spectacle better next time/ use the enemy's spectacle against itself crowd on the East Coast.
 
Is it me, or is Malcolm Harris unusually obsessed with porn.:hmm:

It is a reoccurring theme with him, definitely. It is an unabashed too, he tries to make it a bit high-brow but it's mostly an excuse to talk about porn with no real consistency in his opinions. Read a few of his articles now and none of them seem good, I can't see why he is so highly regarded by people. Laurie Penny is a lying gobshite but she does have her moments, this guy is diabolical.

Alarm bells ringing.
 
I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.


He has/had an odd thing about education - he was a student leader of SDS, narrowly lost the election to be UMD's student union president by 88 votes in favour of wider and better university education no cuts etc.

But here I don't think there is any irony - I think he really does mean forget/screw the curriculum at secondary level - the alienated resisters will rise up all the better:

"The way American History is taught, at least as it was taught in an Advanced Placement class with a strong teacher in a liberal public school five years ago, involves acknowledging a bunch of the pain and suffering on which this country was founded and thrived, but to frame it as somewhat inevitable, as part of the inevitable march of history. Teachers describe resistance movements as historical curiosities rather than real alternatives. MLK gets his shout-out, but if Malcolm X gets a paragraph then it’s about his violence and relation to the Nation of Islam. The other night I was watching Reds and during a scene about the Palmer Raids, I remembered that I’d learned about those in school. I had never made an emotional connection between an organized program of repression perpetrated by the U.S. government and that thing I had to remember for that midterm in high school. Teaching kids about the dark parts of American history in a classroom is the best way to make sure they don’t care about them. My dream now is students in El Paso forming an underground Enlightenment reading group, passing around dog-eared copies of Diderot and Locke. Not that likely, but maybe slightly more than yesterday. I don’t know, maybe it will piss off some liberal teacher enough for her to pull out the People’s History copy left on her shelf from college and lend it to a curious student. In the mean time, good riddance to the social contract and empiricism.

What this news item does end up doing is get a lot of liberals to start defending Thomas fucking Jefferson and his bullshit Enlightenment values. Instead, I’ll be working with my new allies on the right at heightening the contradictions and alienating students past the breaking point. See, at first I thought the 10 conservative BoE members were just nutball ideologues, but then I read this sentence in the Times story, “Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Get rid of any mention of tolerant America’s pluralistic founding and then teach the kids about Huey and Bobby? Well done comrades, well done."

Hence to equate screws with teachers works for him, because once teachers' salaries get cut via the right they'll be even more annoying/harsh to students, upping the alienation anti.
 
Going to leave this one here:

“If you can’t turn it into money, it isn’t cultural capital.” — Malcolm Harris
 
The New Inquiry are hosting an event tonight at the gallery where Molly Crabapple's Shell Game is being exhibited. Helena's going. And if the facebook event listing isn't made private, we can all go :)
 
Malcolm Harris on a news article about one of the Boston bombers:
In the space of like a couple hundred words this story quotes the aunt saying he both was and wasn't a devout Muslim
 
https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/176930854214451200

Malcolm Harris: If you can't turn it into money, it's not cultural capital.

How does that gel with his column for the UMD paper Adults: Ruining society for the rest of us


Frequent readers might think I'm referring to the marginal Republican party or the larger capitalist bourgeoisie. I'm not. Nor am I talking about Democrats, academics, immigrants or the media. I'm talking about the group that is responsible for the state of the world that my fellow students and I will inherit: adults.
Sure, President George W. Bush did a lot of damage himself, but he was aided and abetted by the whole country's adult population. Not only did they not rise up and overthrow the government after the second war of choice the president committed our soldiers to, but they re-elected him because the other guy seemed a little too French. A lot of adults didn't vote for Bush, but they've shown themselves to be completely unreasonable in their reactions. Revolutions, or at least riots, have been justified by far less.

all adults arae culpable for the Bush era - and the conclusion is:

Ironically, we may have to look to the past for the answer to our problem. First appearing in 1968's Wild in the Streets — a film about a teen rock star who gets the voting age reduced to 15, doses Washington's water with LSD and gets elected president — one of the 1960's most enduring and useful clichés offers us a guideline we could now use again: "Don't trust anyone over 30."

The more I see, the more I think he is a complete whack - like needing psychological help - unless it is all irony in which case I don't want to read anything ever again.
Can you Firky invite him to discuss some issues on this thread - I think he might be impressed that limey twats want him to clarify his statements about Gucci Mane. :D
 
We should appeal to his vanity. We can reference Odd Future collective members (e.g. Mellowhype) and combine them with Worker's Girder style pseudo-Marxist statements. This will pique both the hipster twat and second-rate intellectual in him.
 
How does that gel with his column for the UMD paper Adults: Ruining society for the rest of us




all adults arae culpable for the Bush era - and the conclusion is:



The more I see, the more I think he is a complete whack - like needing psychological help - unless it is all irony in which case I don't want to read anything ever again.
Can you Firky invite him to discuss some issues on this thread - I think he might be impressed that limey twats want him to clarify his statements about Gucci Mane. :D
It would be good if he came over to discuss things :)

Wait, isn't LP in New York at the moment? ETA: Yes, she is. Wonder if she'll go to this event at the gallery?
 
sihhi I will give it a go, sure. Molly was one step ahead of me when I tried to get her to answer some questions on here. I think she already saw the thread - begrudgingly credit to her she did answer my query on twitter without dismissing me as a right wing troll. I don't like to use the word 'nutter' to describe people with MH problems but he does come across as one!
 
We should appeal to his vanity. We can reference Odd Future collective members (e.g. Mellowhype)

Good idea there's a MellowHype song called - 'F*** The Police' - fans of the New Inquiry want you to do a rap music special on its relationship to insurrectionary anarchism.

Or else I suggest going the J Ed route and asking him for his thoughts on Chief 'I don't like' Keef and his sexist/misogynistic content.
 
sihhi I will give it a go, sure. Molly was one step ahead of me when I tried to get her to answer some questions on here. I think she already saw the thread - begrudgingly credit to her she did answer my query on twitter without dismissing me as a right wing troll. I don't like to use the word 'nutter' to describe people with MH problems but he does come across as one!

Edit: I'm not reading properly, give it a go
 
My tact was going to be to simply to ask him if him if he'd like to contribute some of his opinions to an anarchist forum; there's a lot of people interested in his work.
 
I don't think he would contribute to u75 unless he was paid tbh, then again Molly did an IAMA on reddit for free...
 
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