SpineyNorman
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I would have said that the principle difference lies in the fact that the clash were good. This lot are shit.
Good is always better than shit.
Good is always better than shit.
Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags
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Nice one asked a question. I answered it.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Marvellous poetry from Anna Chen, pretty much the nearest I have seen to The Waste Land
SpineyNorman
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Profound
Favelado
J'adore South Shore
She never said that to be fair. It was just me mocking.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
It's the title of her poem!
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...EwAA#v=onepage&q=laurie penny saudade&f=false
Favelado
J'adore South Shore
That's an extraordinary coincidence then. I chose it as a word I knew to take the piss out of her with and she's actually used it in a poem?
Wow, how weird.
Nice one
Well-Known Member
goes with out saying good is always better than shit. I love strummer, i love the clash but still doesn't change the fact strummer and laurie penny share the same class background, the same privilege.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
That would probably work well as a performance piece. And it's a damn sight better than Amanda Palmer's A Poem for Dzokhar, which is worthy of the great Rik The People's Poet himself:
http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/77087877.html
I used to be quite keen on Amanda P. What was I thinking?
Steel Icarus
we move
Is it just me, or does stuff like this (on intersectionality) make anyone else despair? http://kotaku.com/5910857/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
fractionMan
Custom Title
That photo has made me a little bit sick
seventh bullet
sovietwave
The anarchists are on the ice
Shot by Lenin which wasn’t nice
In the freezing Russian cold
There is a story which must be told
About Kronstadt
In the Russian snow the sailors said to Lenin go
But Trotsky was not afraid
A revolution he had made
So if you are down and you feel sad
You won’t feel as down or bad
As the anarchists did at Kronstadt
It must be said
There were some dead
And that isn’t very pleasant
But Russia’s better Red
Than run by Whites and peasants
Shot by Lenin which wasn’t nice
In the freezing Russian cold
There is a story which must be told
About Kronstadt
In the Russian snow the sailors said to Lenin go
But Trotsky was not afraid
A revolution he had made
So if you are down and you feel sad
You won’t feel as down or bad
As the anarchists did at Kronstadt
It must be said
There were some dead
And that isn’t very pleasant
But Russia’s better Red
Than run by Whites and peasants
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
That has to be one of my favourites. Brilliant production from Martin Hannet as well.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Very early Girls Aloud Demo B side. Very rare
A little bit - If only because material privilige, ie money and class, is (quite deliberately) totally ignored and how it presents all oppression as something which takes place exclusively within a framework of individuals and their identities. It makes you wonder what difficulty "being poor regardless of identity" would be in this analogy. Thatcher's children strike again - radicalism in the era of hegenomic neoliberal individualism. The priviliges and power relationships involved in fulfilling basic human needs, ie food water shelter, don't seem to count for very much. I also think the way in which (some, but not all) people present arguments about priviliges and so on are just spouting banal truisms wrapped up in intersectional jargon and buzzwords. Like that article, you'll get no argument from me about the advantages being straight white hetero male brings, and certainly making sure those advantages are known by straight white men is useful, if a bit tiresome for men like me. But it's hardly a new radical insight, is it? I could've told you that when I was 14 and my favourite TV show was Robot Wars.
However even if it does annoy people I think it's necessary to keep people on their toes, even if it's tiresome at times, and if it can lead to people behaving more considerately and showing a bit of self-awareness it'll be worth it. I have my doubts about how effective that is going to be as a means by which to challenge oppression which is de-personalised and institutional in nature. My guess is privilige checking will be about as effective at fighting patriachy/kyriachy as political correctness has been in fighting racism.
I think I'd worked out a lot of things they're discussing on here of my own volition by the time I was in my late teens. For instance, talking shit. I'm good at it - world class bullshit artist me. Natural born. I've talked shit and bored everyone to death at meetings before. It took me a few years to develop a sense of self-awareness and to rein myself, but I did (more or less) in the end. The key thing to remember is the difference is I'd get my bullshit indulged in a way non-white, non-male participants would not. It's quite hard to swallow that your perpetuating something quite nasty when you're, in all sincerity, just being young and a bit naive, not consciously perpetuating privilige, but when explained in a non-condescending way it actually makes sense. The danger is it won't be explained in a non-condescending way, that it'll start with an "Um... actually" and probably have "problematic" instead of problem and a load of words you're not sure what they mean but they sure as hell make you feel stupid. I don't think doing that will help deal with privilige any more than standing in front of someone who uses politically incorrect language and shouting "HITLER!" whilst pointing in their faces will deal with racism.
I don't think that sort of deep hostility to any vaguely materialist concept of oppression is shared by everyone who's into smashing the Kyriachy, certainly there is no basis for it in theory or any good reason I can see why it's inconsistent with a materialist approach to fighting oppression, I suppose it's a matter of emphasis and presentation at stake here. If you're middle-class and have grown up in a bubble of financial security, never knowing what's like to go without or go hungry, I suppose it'd be quite easy to take for granted that privilige begins and ends with identity politics. There is a material basis for gender and racial oppression, capitalism relies on a gendered and racialised class system, but it's one that gets overlooked quite often within this tendency of thought, and amongst some there's actually a virulent hostility to any sort of class politics (not my comrades etc). Perhaps that's a reaction to decades of seeing feminist and anti-racist struggles negated and seen as distractions from the all-encompassing class struggle, perhaps it's because it draws in quite a lot of very middle-class people who are keen to play down the importance of material wealth as a source of privilige in favour of identities because of their own material privilges. There's a lot going on there.
That's quite a lot of writing for what was meant as a quick one-sentence comment so I might have to edit bits out if I've not given it the proper thought. I hate writing things things off the top of my head coz I always get the feeling I'm gonna come back 30 mins later and go "nope, you've got it all wrong, what an idiot"
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
Which was itself a cover of the Chuckle Brothers' original as featured on their Sill Me Silly You EP.
Cheers - Louis MacNeice
Steel Icarus
we move
Thanks Delroy, that's a good post, and not too long. I'll come back to it later cos right now my daughter is insisting it's her turn for the PC
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
It is often said that ‘the germ of girls aloud was in chucklevision at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, chucklevision also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious Popstars: the Rivals series ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
But that's where the similarity ends. Enjoying privilege while pretending to be oppressed by those who haven't had the life chances she's had is pretty much all there is to consumer radicals like LP and co.
There was a lot more to Strummer and The Clash than that. And JS had humility, he didn't always just want to talk about himself. They can't help the background they come from - it's what they do with it that matters. It's a bit of a bizarre comparison if you ask me.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Indeed, where has LP came out and attacked private schooling? Nowhere as far as i can tell - we have though been treated to her swanning around them post-education doing talks for her fav teachers and supporting the exclusive networks of privilege that these places are designed to produce and maintain.
Steel Icarus
we move
No, she said how lucky she was to have gone to public school while commenting about the unfairness of the system, iirc.
Steel Icarus
we move
Apols, here's the actual quote, although it says the same thing more-or-less
Laurie Penny said:
in here http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Note the aggressive forcing of the argument that "that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school" into the mouths of all who think it may tell us something about how privilege works in this country, something she clearly doesn't yet get given the multitude of sins covered up by her odious 'lucky'.
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