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

[Greebo]

I have resorted to Wikipedia for some Phil-depth level "research": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_barrel_firearms

And to think that I can remember when saying that somebody used wikipedia for information was right down there with accusing them of having an occult library full of Llewellyn.

 

[ViolentPanda]

thats what they all say #protocols

Not my fault you didn't read the rulebook, sonny!

 

[JimW]

And to think that I can remember when saying that somebody used wikipedia for information was right down there with accusing them of having an occult library full of Llewellyn.

I used to have to read the academic book reviews in the Sunday papers to be a pub quiz bore style know-it-all, but with the magic of the Internet I can do it any day of the week.

 

[sihhi]

Middle class dressing-up. Boring.

It apparently has a strong left/socialist heritage due to anti-capitalist figures like Molly Crapabble:

Tim O’Shea: What is the core appeal of steampunk fiction for you as a creator?

Molly Crabapple: I started drawing steampunk pictures in college. A teacher assigned me to design a skateboard deck, and, rebellious thing that I was, I thought it would be hilarious to imagine skateboarding as the sport of trussed Victorian ladies. I drew a board titled “Lady Etheldrina’s Wheeled Conveyance”, which shows a bouffant haired aristocrat on a skateboard, which is then being hauled by her maid.
I like working in the steampunk genre because I get to imagine the horrifying and hilarious ways technology would distort my favorite time periods.

O’Shea: Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like the opening panel of your story must have been hell to draw. Was it?

Crabapple: Yes! Oh yes it was.

O’Shea: How many weeks is Puppet Makers running–and how frequently will it be updated?

Crabapple: Puppet Makers should run to 240 pages, and is updated every Wednesday

O’Shea: Given that Kevin Colden’s I Rule the Night is a mature content story at Zuda, I was surprised to see you did not develop a mature content tale yourself. Care to explain your thinking on not going for a mature content tale?

Crabapple: I had a few reasons. First, me and John feel like we’ve been pigeonholed as the people who make the comics about sexy sexy sex, and while we like boobs as much as anyone, doing only boobs causes people to overlook your other talents. Second, I hate content filters with a fiery passion. The world isn’t childproof- if you don’t want your kid to see the organ they came out of, keep them away from a computer. Not that that will work anyway.

O’Shea: When you’re steampunking history as you are with this story, is there still an amount of research to be done on the front end? Do you or collaborator John Leavitt do the bulk of the research (or is the load shared)?

Crabapple: When you steampunk up a time period, you actually need to know more about it than if you were doing straight historical drama, because you have to know their design grammer and societal norms well enough to imagine how anachronistic tech would change them.

Luckily, me and John are both history junkies. We’ve spent years intrigued by the machinations of Versailles- how Louis XIV’s perfect trap for the nobility eventually led to the French revolution. We gobble up biographies and design books. I’ve been memorizing Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence

 

[J Ed]

Crabapple: I had a few reasons. First, me and John feel like we’ve been pigeonholed as the people who make the comics about sexy sexy sex, and while we like boobs as much as anyone, doing only boobs causes people to overlook your other talents. Second, I hate content filters with a fiery passion. The world isn’t childproof- if you don’t want your kid to see the organ they came out of, keep them away from a computer. Not that that will work anyway.

I see that Molly and Malcolm share common interests.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Aren't the gas masks a bit weird?

Steampunkers probably come up with some spurious justification to do with the amount of sulphurous smogs caused by all those coal-fired boilers.

 

[weepiper]

It apparently has a strong left/socialist heritage due to anti-capitalist figures like Molly Crapabble:

'Anti-capitalist' figures like Molly 'monetise your hotness' Crabapple?

 

[sihhi]

I see that Molly and Malcolm share common interests.

He is so __________ it's unreal:

1 "Det. Olivia Benson backstory movie Kickstarter"

2 "If it turns out there actually are purity cults and no one invited me to join one it will totally hurt my feelings."

3 "Vanessa Hudgens is going with the whole evil thing and that's a cool artistic choice 24.media.tumblr.com/f4def59cf398d8… 25.media.tumblr.com/0e15411aa1b39d…"


Alongside more questions about defending education from neoliberalisation. Should that be "?"

If The University were to be salvaged/defended from neoliberalism wouldn't that be like historically anomalous?

and bigging up the idea that you should promote your in-crowd, talking with some author complaining that the Nation didn't review his books:

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/331261010520444928

JeffSharlet: I interned at The Nation, published in The Nation, took money from The Nation Institute: Never a peep or word for any one of my five books.

Malcolm Harris @BigMeanInternet: promoting contributors' work is the fun part!

JeffSharlet: I believe that & practice it. I like you enough to publish yr articles, I want people to read read yr books.

Malcolm Harris: what a joy, to brag for your friends and colleagues. it's a small grace to lighten their self-promotional burden.

JeffSharlet: I *think* u might be in earnest, but what the hell, I agree either way. Boosting yr pals' work is an honest pleasure.

Malcolm Harris: I am totally and completely in earnest. see: my twitter feed, TNI's &, Meanwhile section.

I don't know how to describe him properly, but I think he is being weird on purpose - what is the word for that?

 

[cesare]

I'd never heard of steampunk before I joined urban. And even then I thought it was Mad Max dressing.

 

[J Ed]

I can't help but feel that steampunk is a bit stupid, but I don't like any kind of dressing up really. I like the fallout games which are apparently 'post-apocalyptic diesel-punk' but it wouldn't occur to me to dress up like I was in it...

 

[J Ed]

I don't know how to describe him properly, but I think he is being weird on purpose - what is the word for that?

Malapropism?

I know what you mean, his Yorktown nonsense was very much like that.

 

[sihhi]

I'd never heard of steampunk before I joined urban. And even then I thought it was Mad Max dressing.

It's my first time hearing it too and part of it sounds like a Star Trek convention but it purposefully mangles history.

What follows is a discussion of three pieces of short steampunk fiction: “The Anachronist’s Cookbook” by Catherine M. Valente, “Machine Maid” by Margo Lanagan, and “The Steam Dancer (1896)” by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Each of these stories approaches steampunk from a decidedly feminist angle while individually representing a unique perspective on the relationship between women, technology, and their bodies.

In the introduction to “The Anachronist’s Cookbook” from the anthology Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Valente writes of steampunk: “I had so many political and intellectual issues with it that I couldn’t imagine writing a story that merrily went on its way without addressing them. Hence Jane was born, because you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites, and angry young women.” Jane, the protagonist to whom Valente refers, is indeed an angry young woman, one of what the story refers to as a “confederation” of pickpockets who plagued Manchester, replacing the nicked goods with fiery political pamphlets. Sadly, Jane is picked up by the authorities, but she is far from defeated.

While imprisoned Jane is subjected to the sexual advances of one of the bailiffs, yet she faces the man with a bitter defiance and her body, plastered beneath her modest dress with riveting political pamphlets advocating the leveling of industrial machines and airships, becomes an agent of revolution rather than a vessel of submission. Jane’s world is one in which women have been replaced by “Programmable Home Tailors,” one in which the airships that hover above the city as “Floating Engines of Oppression,” are built on the “bruised bodies, broken knuckles, and lost limbs,” of young children; in short, Jane’s pamphlet remarks: “How wonderful is this world – for the Men who Made it.”

you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites,

 

[sihhi]

Malapropism?

I know what you mean, his Yorktown nonsense was very much like that.

Go complete your nation's (already completed) bourgeios revolution

 

[J Ed]

you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites,

http://steampunkanarchist.wordpress.com/what-is-steampunk/

 

[cesare]

Sihhi, I think this was the first time I heard of it though it may have been mentioned before: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/steampunk-as-fashion-just-how-cool-is-it.224602/

 

[andysays]

...I don't know how to describe him properly, but I think he is being weird on purpose - what is the word for that?

Malapropism? I know what you mean, his Yorktown nonsense was very much like that.

No, I think the word is probably just "wanker"

 

[Idris2002]

 

[sihhi]

Sihhi, I think this was the first time I heard of it though it may have been mentioned before: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/steampunk-as-fashion-just-how-cool-is-it.224602/

Ta. at ba's response:

It's like 4 Non Blondes isn't it - dreads with top hats, cyber-fagin oh god.

Content for Malcolm Harris to analyse:

And I pray, oh my God do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution...
And I say he- ey -ey ey ...
And I say hey what's goin' on

And Ke$ha says “I am capital. Capital is a liar.” ... If you do a close reading of almost any of these pop songs, especially the better ones, it’s amazing to see the fragments that stick out. The only feeling left for the music industry to sell back to us is crisis, and it makes for really great dance music.

 

[andysays]

snip

That is, like, some sick shit, bro...

 

[Frances Lengel]

I have resorted to Wikipedia for some Phil-depth level "research": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_barrel_firearms

You should've just put "Phil-level" research. There was a kid I went to junior school called Phil who was a bit chubby. One time after school I had to wait for my mum at his house til about eight at night for some reason. Anyway, on looking in one of the cupboards I noticed he'd written "Phil's" on the lids of all the pot noodles & amended the bit on the side that says Fill Level to read "Phil Level".

So you can see why it would've been better.

E2a - It was actually my brother who had to wait chez Phil, but I've appropriated his experience for the sake of having an anecdote to relate. Which is quite Pennyish really.

 

[treelover]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/06/the-myth-of-web-toxicity

Back on topic, new article by Laura in the Guardian

 

[sihhi]

Remember the gallery where MC placed pornographic star Stoya topless into a bath? Dissent Magazine held a discussion there for its BeLabored issue.

 

[sihhi]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/06/the-myth-of-web-toxicity

Back on topic, new article by Laura in the Guardian

If the guy is playing video games he is doing it wrong:

Can anyone escape the internet? Tech journalist Paul Miller decided to give it a try. As an experiment, Miller, a New Yorker who has lived and worked largely online for half his life, spent an entire year in self-imposed exile from social media, search engines, pornography, email access and even text messaging, hoping in the process to discover his "real" self. In fact, he spent most of that year bored, cut off from family and friends, sitting on the sofa playing video games.

Good note to leave though.

 

[J Ed]

Remember the gallery where MC placed pornographic star Stoya topless into a bath? Dissent Magazine held a discussion there for its BeLabored issue.

If only we could find some way to harness LP's smugness in this picture...

 

[el-ahrairah]

a self-desrcibed "crypto-anarchist" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22421185

 

[seventh bullet]

Upper middle class people talking about working class people in an art gallery with pictures of Laurie Penny on the walls?

 

[phildwyer]

you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites,

You not only can, you must.

Neither the Levellers nor the Luddites were Victorian.

 

[cesare]

You not only can, you must.

Neither the Levellers nor the Luddites were Victorian.

I think that's why Sihhi took that Valente quote and added an

 

[andysays]

If only we could find some way to harness LP's smugness in this picture...

Sorry, J, Lolz has already cornered the market in harnessing/monetizing her smugness.

You'll have to be a lot quicker than that if you want to beat the smartest kid from a smart school...

 

[equationgirl]

Malcolm Harris makes a comment on Twitter that sure looks racist to me...

Malcolm Harris ‏@BigMeanInternet

18h​

@pushinghoops also iphones. only white people have iphones. black teens use cans with string.

He also seems to having a rather nasty exchange with the girlfriend of one of the guys recently arrested for obstructing the investigation into the Boston bombing.