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

[rekil]

Excellent new take on "Don't you know who I am?" with "Do you know all the people I named?"



No, sorry - didn't go to school/college/tea/parties with them

doesn't have to be me. Get Nina, JD, Sophie, Marie, Zoe. Promote and advocate for women.

Nina = Nina Petrova obv.



JD = ?
Sophie = Sophie Wilkinson? Guardian columnist.
Marie = ?
Zoe = Laura's mate Stavvers (or Zoe Williams) NS, Indy, Guardian columnists

 

[butchersapron]

Nina = Nina Petrova obv.


JD = ?
Sophie = Sophie Wilkinson? Guardian columnist.
Marie = ?
Zoe = Laura's mate Stavvers (or Zoe Williams) NS, Indy, Guardian columnists

The voiceless major paper columnists.

 

[kavenism]

Yeah I know plenty of British pretentious idiots that have disappeared up their own arses while reading post-modernist articles about English literature. If you told me any number of people I know at uni wrote that I'd believe it.

Would It too pretentious to say that that quote makes perfect sense to me, and although the sentence structure lends itself to being accused of post-modern posturing, the body of theory to which it refers is in reality quite opposed to all that PM guff. The Wittgenstein example is being used to draw attention to the distinction between a rule governed norm (like Laws against so and so) and a norm which comes about through repetitive practices (through history) which are not covered by explicit rules, such as those that that inform what is acceptable and non acceptable sexual conduct. Since these non rule governed norms have no explicit form they often appear as immutable cultural or historical facts and thus are difficult to challenge. Nevertheless they are a prime target for activists engaged in trying to think and act differently. Practices of freedom as Foucault would come to call them.

 

[J Ed]

http://leftunity.org/the-cult-of-activism/ I think this is pretty good

 

[butchersapron]

Would It too pretentious to say that that quote makes perfect sense to me, and although the sentence structure lends itself to being accused of post-modern posturing, the body of theory to which it refers is in reality quite opposed to all that PM guff. The Wittgenstein example is being used to draw attention to the distinction between a rule governed norm (like Laws against so and so) and a norm which comes about through repetitive practices (through history) which are not covered by explicit rules, such as those that that inform what is acceptable and non acceptable sexual conduct. Since these non rule governed norms have no explicit form they often appear as immutable cultural or historical facts and thus are difficult to challenge. Nevertheless they are a prime target for activists engaged in trying to think and act differently. Practices of freedom as Foucault would come to call them.

Or, why should i clean my room mum?

The questions aren't asked here by these people to uncover what value social norms offered historically - but just to pose as the great questioner.

 

[rekil]

The voiceless major paper columnists.

Is Zoe Stavri a Brighton College product as well? Williams is from Godolphin and Latymer School (5.5k per term)

 

[butchersapron]

Is Zoe Stavri a Brighton College product as well? Williams is from Godolphin and Latymer School (5.5k per term)

I know nothing about her.

 

[rekil]

I know nothing about her.

Misogynist.

 

[sihhi]

They are the sort of people who would consider it devilishly delightful to argue in the antebellum US that slavery must be preserved because it was the clearest demonstration possible of the unfree nature of that society. And once that's done, onto the next petty verbal provocation. As such these people are easily seen through by the wider class (esp that politically (formally) part of it, and have no social weight - are not really relevant.

I don't think they are 'the worse, the better' types. Malcolm Harris does chop and change and a lot of what he writes about is reviews of culture especially highbrow novels and popular culture so the politics is hard to pin down.

Your ref to civil war is pretty heavy and doesn't really work with their vision of struggling against liberal anti-racism.

Going back to the privilege analysis that underpins some of the politics. Perhaps some are reacting against the liberal anti-racism of their parents - fair employment laws, welfare benefits and diversity programmes - but no direct engagement with the sharper end and moving to middle-class suburbs for good school precincts.

They are reacting with a hyper 'all white people are basically racist' and 'only white people can be racist' (both statements of course have large elements of truth) - the conservatives want to destroy all anti-racism, the liberals pretend to be anti-racists, so the left must be pretending too.

 

[frogwoman]

I understand the arguments for the whole "all white people are racist" and "only white people can be racist" things but i think they only ever really can apply in a first world context and even then they're very very flawed. what about NOI conspiracy theories about jews for instance or something like the Lozells riots?

 

[sihhi]

Nina = Nina Petrova obv.

View attachment 31949

JD = ?
Sophie = Sophie Wilkinson? Guardian columnist.
Marie = ?
Zoe = Laura's mate Stavvers (or Zoe Williams) NS, Indy, Guardian columnists

Ones that fit the names from the Guardian-Independent wing of newspapers are Nina Power for Nina, Zoe Stavri for Zoe and Marie Winckler for Marie. Could be totally barking up the wrong tree - and they might be working-class journalists in local papers or unemployed working class graduates.

 

[andysays]

Could anyone but an American write this? I think not.

"Sex (as I endeavor to have it, at very least), is an innovative act because, like Wittgenstein’s example of the required height of a shot in tennis, it is neither against nor within the rules, a practice of normality rather than norms."

Hopefully anyone not American but writing in English would at least spell "endeavour" correctly

 

[sihhi]

I understand the arguments for the whole "all white people are racist" and "only white people can be racist" things but i think they only ever really can apply in a first world context and even then they're very very flawed. what about NOI conspiracy theories about jews for instance or something like the Lozells riots?

They're not meant to be taken literally - they are meant to scare white middle-class liberals. Bits of the black movement in the US used them to get rid of warn away middle-class interlopers (overwhelmingly whites). Saying it now doesn't win over black participants anyway - the NOI with AWAR and OWAR attitudes - only did well where it could organise serious anti-dug efforts at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.

 

[love detective]

they might be working-class journalists in local papers or unemployed working class graduates.

 

[JimW]

If you squint really hard down at the ground as your jet takes off from Heathrow en route for a New York art opening, you can sometimes spot a working class person and one of those might well be a journalist, so it's not like LP doesn't know any.

 

[articul8]

class clearly doesn't exist in NY - that's why Laurie will take up Louise Mensch's suggestion they meet up - it's all good for the sisterhood.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Remember the context for his remarks on teachers - calling on other teachers to scab against teachers involved in an ongoing strike - which itself, apart from being politically ridiculous, is a logical dogs dinner. If, as he argues teachers role make them the moral equivalent of prison guards (i.e it's a characteristic of the role full stop), then why would having teachers replace teachers make a blind bit of difference?

Well quite. He's obviously Emersonian in his feelings about logical consistency.

As for the return to natural education type stuff, always rather too close to hey kids, why don't you take all your clothes up, look i'm not a teacher or your parents, or a nasty adult, look i'll do it too!

The circumstantial evidence of crypto-noncehood keeps accumulating...

 

[Balbi]

Actually (at primary school at least) I think it's because teachers/schools think it is important to encourage feckless parents to be more involved with their children, have some quality time where they are engaging with them instead of just sticking them in front of the TV. It doesn't have to be an art project, it can be any homework that the child needs parental support to do.

Yep. We go for Art & Design and offer use of materials sometimes for parents - alongside reading, spelling and the odd bit of numeracy. The level our children come in at is pretty low, nursery kids who aren't entirely aware of their own name or how to indicate they want to go to the toilet, or to talk to other people, or play with other children at all. We start getting parents into the classroom to work with them, while we subtly model what working with your child looks like. That goes on all the way up to Year 3 and 4 - getting parents in one morning a week for a half hour to work with their child. Vital, vital, vital.

 

[sihhi]

Another figure at the heart of the New Inquiry is Mike Thomsen, author of Levivate the Primate, published/distributed by Marxist Zer0 books:

does the human relationships features for the New Inquiry

Mike Thomsen: Do you think finally the values of dating are unnatural when you have these periodic impulses to just fuck? I think most people would identify with some subconscious, animal curiosity about other people’s sex.

MS: I think it’s possible to fuck someone and then decide you’re going to date. I know some people who hooked up on Craigslist Casual Encounters and then decided to have a relationship. I don’t think it’s contrary.

Mike Thomsen: Shouldn’t that be the primary way of looking at sex? Not that we’re having too much with too many partners, but that we’re not having enough, and attach too much preciousness to it when we do?

People, stop attaching too much preciousness to sex!

Here he is at a New Inquiry left reading/meeting event thing reading from Levivate the Primate which Harris describes as "A crushingly honest collection of confessions about love in the shape of sex, from which any American man could learn a thing or ten. Malcolm Harris"

He considers that dating (and beyond) a writer about sex means something important in increasing honesty in human relationships or something, and that there's nothing with being part of a writer's "post-hump confessional":

All worthwhile sex writing must eventually confront this point, the necessary founding of love in an acceptance of someone else's most humiliating parts, to find in their balance with all the person's more admirable qualities some honest, mortal beauty. The threshold apprehension one feels on dates, the slow unfolding retreat to questionnaire conversations about subjects neither person especially cares about is a subconscious reaction to the suspicion that were we to be honest with one another, we would by definition be ugly. One either rejects this impulse as absurd and gets on with the process of intimacy by consciously fighting against or ignoring it; or else one hastens home to write about it after the fact.

If there is always something unpleasant about the prospect of losing control of one's narrative in someone else's post-hump confessional, there is also something reassuring in finding someone so overwhelmed by the formal impositions of dating culture that they can only handle processing it honestly in private.

To trust one's partner with all those thoughts would be the first step toward not writing about sex, to sharing the processing with a trusted other, which would need no paper trail thereafter, preliminary acts in a narrative that would need no medium, nor author, but would instead create itself spontaneously, an act of trust generating another.

In that way, a date with a sex writer may be a preliminary way to move from the stilting formality of a date into a human exchange with someone who is by nature likely to be at least conscious of their own flaws, and probably more likely to be entertained by yours.

Seems to be enjoying the fact that contraceptives have been cooked inside frying pans besides designer salters:

A bit like Malcolm Harris with turning non-sexual culture into sexualised culture. Skyrim is a quest style computer game:

It’s hard to not compare Skyrim’s checklist mission design with how-to sex writing. Consider: “Approximately an inch or two inside her vagina, you’ll feel a round spongy patch; that, my friends, is her G-spot. Move your fingers in a come-hither motion… To take it up a notch, use your other hand to press down on the area between her naval and her pubic mound…Coax her by saying things like ‘I can’t wait for you to come’” Now compare it with: “The mythical horn of Jurgen Windcaller is tucked away in Ustengrav located slightly northeast of Morthal…Once you reach a great opening that careens into a waterfall, make your way down for a chest on a path to the left…Head out and on to the Sleeping Giant Inn in Riverwood. Speak to Delphine and request the attic room. Head to sleep only to be woken by Delphine, at which point she finally relinquishes the horn…”

 

[Thora]

Yep. We go for Art & Design and offer use of materials sometimes for parents - alongside reading, spelling and the odd bit of numeracy. The level our children come in at is pretty low, nursery kids who aren't entirely aware of their own name or how to indicate they want to go to the toilet, or to talk to other people, or play with other children at all. We start getting parents into the classroom to work with them, while we subtly model what working with your child looks like. That goes on all the way up to Year 3 and 4 - getting parents in one morning a week for a half hour to work with their child. Vital, vital, vital.

Inviting parents in is different to sending work home for parents to do. Though actually I really object to a lot of the last minute "come to a special assembly/activity tomorrow" stuff schools do too.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I suspect that he probably spotted the danger in what he was saying and had enough suss to work out some semi-plausible path out of it, but if he has got away with it (i don't know if he has) i wouldn't put it down to the content of his argument, more that the people he writes for have no understanding of what politics actually is. They think it's just a word-game, a parlour game and no effects beyond the rhetorical are to be expected from what ever you argue.

They are the sort of people who would consider it devilishly delightful to argue in the antebellum US that slavery must be preserved because it was the clearest demonstration possible of the unfree nature of that society. And once that's done, onto the next petty verbal provocation. As such these people are easily seen through by the wider class (esp that politically (formally) part of it, and have no social weight - are not really relevant.

But before someone replies if they have no social weight then why are you going on about them? If they don't matter then wtf are you on about? It must be remembered that it's their ideas that have no social weight , their arguments. The role they play in putting people off this public-left is very very real though, that's where they have some social weight (even if negatively from our perspective). The two are part of one rotten whole. Their ideas have to be idiotic, self-centred and socially meaningless if they're going to be able to play this second role of alienating people from active political participation.

Can't remember where I read it, although it might have been the old London Labour Briefing, but I recall someone making an argument for calling the effect "displacement", insofar as their ideas displace the allegiance of elements of the "tribal" left rightwards in...well, not disgust, but contempt. IIRC they blamed Crossman.

 

[Balbi]

Inviting parents in is different to sending work home for parents to do. Though actually I really object to a lot of the last minute "come to a special assembly/activity tomorrow" stuff schools do too.

That drives me up the wall - often the class teachers get about three hours notice on some of the stuff the head's arranged - and we get the joyous experience of copping the flak from the parents

 

[ViolentPanda]

Nina = Nina Petrova obv.

View attachment 31949

JD = ?
Sophie = Sophie Wilkinson? Guardian columnist.
Marie = ?
Zoe = Laura's mate Stavvers (or Zoe Williams) NS, Indy, Guardian columnists

Has to be someone from inside the bubble, obviously.
Might run the risk of the woman not being white and middle-class, and thus not fully up-to-speed on privilege theory, otherwise.

You know what's annoying me? I've been re-reading bits of Bakhtin lately, mostly "The Dialogic Imagination", plus a few analyses of his stuff, and it justs highlights for me how much writers like Penny, Harris, Hari, etc - all those who play on their supposed/imagined "out-group" or "othered" status - actually write stuff that's the epitome of what Bakhtin talked about when he spoke of "centripetal forces" within discourse. Stuff that's "establishment" through and through, that supports and sustains conservative forces, rather than challenging them on anything but a surface level.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Misogynist.

Doesn't that make him a racist too, on this thread?

 

[equationgirl]

Are you saying he was trying to shill for Rahm Emanuel while retaining radical credentials?


Some of his later interventions are interesting:

Malcolm Harris ‏@BigMeanInternet

11 Sep​

@OaklandElle@laurenriot@akerfoot @OaktownMike @OakScott I got the best public education in the country and kids killed themselves a lot.

Malcolm Harris ‏@BigMeanInternet

12 Sep​

@OakScott @OaktownMike I've seen teachers enforce a system and produce situations that literally makes kids kill themselves

I'll say it again. The 'public school' (US for comprehensive) education he got would be very very different to the public school education black Southside Chicago students get because he was brought up in Palo Alto, a rich private town in California. Hardly the same thing at all by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[frogwoman]

I've put somethign on the blog now if anyone wants to have a look. Bit rushed though and not as in depth as I'd like but I was sick of writing/thinking about these people

 

[Idris2002]

Americans always think of sex. Their minds are constantly in the gutter. Far worse than any other nation ime.

And they - or some of them at least - think about it in peculiar ways. This just in: Diary of Anne Frank is "pornographic", says crazy person:

http://now.msn.com/gail-horalek-says-anne-frank-diary-is-porn-fights-to-pull-it-from-school/

 

[Idris2002]

I'll say it again. The 'public school' (US for comprehensive) education he got would be very very different to the public school education black Southside Chicago students get because he was brought up in Palo Alto, a rich private town in California. Hardly the same thing at all by any stretch of the imagination.

US public schools are financed via local property taxes. So a school in a gutted post-industrial city like Detroit will face funding challenges unknown to the academies of Palo Alto.

 

[treelover]

Another figure at the heart of the New Inquiry is Mike Thomsen, author of Levivate the Primate, published/distributed by Marxist Zer0 books:

does the human relationships features for the New Inquiry




People, stop attaching too much preciousness to sex!

Here he is at a New Inquiry left reading/meeting event thing reading from Levivate the Primate which Harris describes as "A crushingly honest collection of confessions about love in the shape of sex, from which any American man could learn a thing or ten. Malcolm Harris"

He considers that dating (and beyond) a writer about sex means something important in increasing honesty in human relationships or something, and that there's nothing with being part of a writer's "post-hump confessional":




Seems to be enjoying the fact that contraceptives have been cooked inside frying pans besides designer salters:

A bit like Malcolm Harris with turning non-sexual culture into sexualised culture. Skyrim is a quest style computer game:

Why has he got sunglasses clipped to his jumper, when he already has glasses on?

 

[equationgirl]

US public schools are financed via local property taxes. So a school in a gutted post-industrial city like Detroit will face funding challenges unknown to the academies of Palo Alto.

Exactly. It's easy to be a radical when mummy and daddy's money support your choice to live in New York without needing to get 3 jobs to make ends meet.