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

[DaveCinzano]

Radical Chic: That Party at Penny's.

And here we have from the girl herself The return of the Radical Chic evening

Peculiarly enough, whilst having my breakfast dump this morning I reached the RC part of my current toilet book, David Caute's Sixty-Eight*:

[Ben Whitaker MP] visited a popular off-Broadway play, Christmas Turkey, during which a white girl lay naked on a table through most of the action, asking the black nats to eat her and so end race hatred. This, of course, was youthful idealism and sentimentality engaging in the politics of gesture which, when the the appurtenances of wealth are added, becomes radical chic.

...Of the year 1968 [Joan] Didion remarked: I did no good works but I tried to keep in touch. I was responsible. I recognized my name when I saw it.'

* No, not a great work, and not a great writer, but handy for snippets of narrative history and pointers to better books. And Wolfe.

 

[frogwoman]

“There was a lot of eye-rolling when we started talking about this event,” Zoe Kravitz tells me in the smoking area. “There were a lot of people saying – ‘Who wants to listen to a bunch of rich hipsters talk about Occupy Wall Street?’ And that isn’t the answer. Maybe we don’t have an answer, but that isn’t it. So this is a place to check your eye-rolling at the door.” I ask Kravitz what she thinks will bring the real change. She is unequivocal. “Have events like this! Maybe people will show up, maybe people won’t show up, but I think watching people connect on a very human level is the important thing.”

This piece sickens me. It actually SICKENS me.

 

[frogwoman]

'the society of the spectacle'. O RLY. That's a bit fucking Marie Antoinette.

Our lives are a spectacle now Weeps.

 

[DaveCinzano]

Should've gone to SocietyOfTheSpecSavers.

 

[butchersapron]

I ask Kravitz what she thinks will bring the real change...at a party
I ask Rachael Johnson what she thinks will bring the real change...at a party

 

[Ade-oh]

It's all a misunderstanding, didn't someone say that 'the party will be the vanguard of the proletariat'?

 

[Steel Icarus]

Fucking hell. Making shit art with trust fund socialites by jetting in and out of people's struggles and drawing them (looking injured but oddly delighted to be involved in THIS PROJECT) and then going to a party. It wouldn't matter but she's making a good living off this shit and lying her way through. Where did Starkey call her "a little shit"? He didn't. Why say it? What he did was surely bad enough to report exactly. "We smoke roll-up cigarettes. We dream. We party because that's all we can do".

FUCK OFF.

 

[butchersapron]

Can't wait for the CHAV PARTY!!!

 

[articul8]

Do the Americans have CHAVS? - you're just like soooo parochial

 

[rekil]

Birthday tarot lady "is currently studying Afro-Cuban traditions under her Godfather Ochani Lele and is a confirmed child of Eleggua."

 

[chilango]

It's time to get Laura and her mates into some real hardcore vicariousness, huh?

I think the Informal Anarchists need to get in touch with her...

The Schili were the affluent German leftists who often supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang during their time on the run (they were also called “the Raspberry Reich” or the “Schickeria”). “Schili” was a cross between “chic” (schick), and “left” (linke) and was a somewhat derogatory term. Many of the Schili who supported the outlaw gang members by providing shelter and money, later regretted it when the gang’s activities turned deadly. At the time, however, supporting the Baader-Meinhof Gang was a simple way to live vicariously through their activities.

 

[articul8]

Birthday tarot lady "is currently studying Afro-Cuban traditions under her Godfather Ochani Lele and is a confirmed child of Eleggua."

that's the spirit - open the horizons of your mind man

 

[butchersapron]

Birthday tarot lady "is currently studying Afro-Cuban traditions under her Godfather Ochani Lele and is a confirmed child of Eleggua."

Oh brilliant, they are into animal cruelty and torture. Come back Manson family, Dohrn was right.

 

[belboid]

It's not jus full of shit, or all ott. It's a political gossip thread, touching on some important issues

mebbe. Deeply repetitious now. We all know she's a shit writer and a parasite. There's nothing left that is worth saying, is there?

 

[SpineyNorman]

If you find it boring can't you just not read or post on the thread? I mean, it's not particularly productive I admit but I at least find it quite amusing to laugh at her hypocrisy - she embodies all that I hate about the liberal left, it's like someone has taken all the most irritating traits of student wadicals and distilled them into one person. This isn't just a thread about Laurie Penny - it's a thread about all that's wrong with the middle class left.

 

[Steel Icarus]

mebbe. Deeply repetitious now. We all know she's a shit writer and a parasite. There's nothing left that is worth saying, is there?

Posters are commenting on individual articles. So, er, yes there is. You might as well level the same thing at Cameron or David Laws or Stephen Twigg. "Oh, we've got them pegged - best forget about them."

 

[Random]

Agree. That last article about a party was shocking, and shed light on the elite Occupy types

 

[belboid]

Penny fucking Laurie is hardly in the same league as Cameron n Clegg et al tho, is she?

 

[Random]

Belboid you're deeply repetative on this topic and you've nothing worth saying that we've not already heard

 

[frogwoman]

if you've got other articles by other annoying bourgeois twats, then post them up. half of this thread isn't just about laurie penny anyway, it's about molly crabapple and all that shit

 

[Idris2002]

 

[belboid]

Belboid you're deeply repetative on this topic and you've nothing worth saying that we've not already heard

better post a pic of me looking sexy up then, see how that improves the thread

 

[Random]

Joking aside, belboid, I dont think you understand how strongly I feel about this. Ten years or so ago I was involved in an anarchoid event in manchester where I discovered that one of the organisers had invited two of his uni friends, now editor of Dazed and Confused, to cover the (illegal) action from the inside. I and others were called wreckers for objecting to this. The event failed for other reasons, but I have a long term interest in opposing this kind of media corruption of radical protests.

 

[SpineyNorman]

 

[rekil]

The Hari thread wasn't OTT and neither is this. Not as OTT as the Workers Power one anyway.

 

[belboid]

Joking aside, belboid, I dont think you understand how strongly I feel about this. Ten years or so ago I was involved in an anarchoid event in manchester where I discovered that one of the organisers had invited two of his uni friends, now editor of Dazed and Confused, to cover the (illegal) action from the inside. I and others were called wreckers for objecting to this. The event failed for other reasons, but I have a long term interest in opposing this kind of media corruption of radical protests.

Fair do's - it is an important point. But, I think, that kind of point is rather lost amidst all the shite. When a 'phwoar' pic goes up, sorry, but any political point to a thread is lost.

 

[butchersapron]

Fair do's - it is an important point. But, I think, that kind of point is rather lost amidst all the shite. When a 'phwoar' pic goes up, sorry, but any political point to a thread is lost.

Oh leave off, one pic was put up and the crap that followed it was dealt with pretty swiftly. Since then we've actually posted about a whole range of things, uncovered a lot of info and discussed demonstrated the context in which this sort of radical-parasitism exists both in terms of educational privilege and cultural capital in the UK and financial privilege in the US.

 

[rekil]

A thread with 2275 posts and only 1 phwoar pic has to be some kind of record tbh.

 

[Random]

No need to over-dramatise, belboid. A pic like that is also an opportunity to push back agains sexism, it's not to be run from in horror or boredom, not if the topic is important.

 

[DaveCinzano]

It's a 76 page thread with 2,279 posts. There is no single 'political point'. What is relevant or useful or thought-provoking will not be any less so because of some posts betraying ill-considered misogyny (which has been challenged).