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Anarchist Bookfair 2013 October 19th

el-ahrairah said:
I suggested that the cartoon might not be entirely sympathetic to the anarchist cause.
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You said; "anti-anarchist propaganda"

"Two men fought quite violently in the main courtyard, punching each other and knocking over tables. One man smashed a bottle very near to the other’s head. It appeared to be a completely consensual fight, but made many people in the area feel nervous and unsafe."

Presumably none of these people have been to an estate pub in their lives?
 
lazyhack said:
You said; "anti-anarchist propaganda"

"Two men fought quite violently in the main courtyard, punching each other and knocking over tables. One man smashed a bottle very near to the other’s head. It appeared to be a completely consensual fight, but made many people in the area feel nervous and unsafe."

Presumably none of these people have been to an estate pub in their lives?
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Now, think, who are you quoting? Who are you asking?
 
lazyhack said:
You said; "anti-anarchist propaganda"

"Two men fought quite violently in the main courtyard, punching each other and knocking over tables. One man smashed a bottle very near to the other’s head. It appeared to be a completely consensual fight, but made many people in the area feel nervous and unsafe."

Presumably none of these people have been to an estate pub in their lives?
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Whelan your article was abit sensationalist you got to admit. That shit sells though I guess.

Plus did you give the private eye guy the lowdown on what happened at the boot sale?
 
TopCat said:
It's a hilariously partial account.
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Well, yes, but I don't really doubt their claim that the Assangists, once the confrontations began were dishing out anti-trans slurs. Or that a boozing Anon clown started shouting about the feminist movement sucking his dick. That stuff has the ring of truth about it.

The interesting thing about the presentation isn't really the information it presents about the Assangists. I've no problem siding with the intersectionalistas on that one. It isn't really its partiality either (it could hardly be otherwise). It's more what it reveals about the intersectionalist mental landscape. They initiate a set piece confrontation, but in so far as the arseholes they are confronting shout back, the issue is then presented largely in terms of how "unsafe" the responses made various individuals feel. Their desire to delegitimise disagreement, to drive it out of discussion altogether, doesn't end with Nazis (the traditional target of "no platform" stances, directly invoked by an intersectionalist as a comparison in the timeline piece), nor with Assangist crusties but extends in a less dramatic way even to that unlucky anarcha-feminist who was, as far as our writers are concerned, off message on what can and can't be discussed in "our spaces".

It's cheating a bit, as it doesn't come from the timeline, but some of the same people were blowing a gasket on twitter because one of the Novara people said he'd like to get Russell Brand on. The response wasn't "that's a good idea, but it's vital that the interviewer is a feminist who can raise Brand's views on gender while arguing a hard line pro women's liberation point of view". It was a bunch of stuff about how even raising the possibility was "upsetting" people, and listening to him would "hurt us". It then escalated towards an explicit demand for No Platform. There were also rather blunt hints that the Novara dude shouldn't be arguing his point of view on account of his penis. Again the interesting thing about this wasn't that they hate Brand - I certainly think that kind if celebrity "radical" needs to be approached with a healthy skepticism. It was that their response isn't to argue, but to seek to exclude from "our spaces". Even when that's entirely absurd, given the size of the platform in question in comparison with the platform already available to a Brand. They can't actually no platform Russell Brand. What they can do is police the ideological purity of radical "spaces".
 
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It's not the personal as political, it's the personal in place of politics.

Fuck off with your feelings, an emotion isn't a reasoned argument.
 
Refusing to discuss something because it makes you feel "unsafe" is pathetic, it would be pathetic from a conservative or liberal it's contemptible from supposed radicals and revolutionaries.

I wonder how these people deal with the world outside their political/activist/student union bubbles.
 
revol68 said:
It's not the personal as political, it's the personal in place of politics.

Fuck off with your feelings, an emotion isn't a reasoned argument.
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Ah now, revol68, you've just left yourself wide open to a barrage of claims that you are seeking to silence the anger of the oppressed, committing sexist micro aggression and denying the truth of their lived experience.
 
revol68 said:
Fuck off with your feelings, an emotion isn't a reasoned argument.
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People who talk of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints - such people have a corpse in their mouth.
 
Nigel Irritable said:
Ah now, revol68, you've just left yourself wide open to a barrage of claims that you are seeking to silence the anger of the oppressed, committing sexist micro aggression and trying to undermine the truth of their lived experience.
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Nonsense, when I said "kill all women" I was making a structural critique aimed at "women" as a construct of feminity under patriarchy.
 
rioted said:
People who talk of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints - such people have a corpse in their mouth.
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To be fair to the twitter intersectionalists, anarchism (or semi anarchism) has long had an indigenous strand of this stuff. As rioted so kindly demonstrates.
 
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Nigel Irritable said:
Again the interesting thing about this wasn't that they hate Brand - I certainly think that kind if celebrity "radical" needs to be approached with a healthy skepticism. It was that their response isn't to argue, but to seek to exclude from "our spaces". Even when that's entirely absurd, given the size of the platform in question in comparison with the platform already available to a Brand. They can't actually no platform Russell Brand. What they can do is police the ideological purity of radical "spaces".
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That last point is really interesting and insightful. Advocating No Platform not in a general sense but within a certain bubble/mileu whatever you want to call it.

It's quite an inward looking clique really isn't it?

Also agree with you in siding with the intersectionalista crew over these Anon types. Perhaps it's because we've discussed the former lot so much on here in the past that they're getting the most attention here, but let's make no mistake that kind of abusive misogynistic behaviour that comes from that Anonymous tendency is totally unacceptable, in any kind of scenario.

It's weird because I've felt in this position before - I don't agree with much of the logic but on the issue itself I tend to come down on the same side as the intersectionalista, albeit with a different set of reasonings leading up to it.
 
rioted said:
People who talk of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints - such people have a corpse in their mouth.
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He didn't mean that you should reduce politics to going on about your feelings.

Everyday life isn't just your emotions, some private sphere.

Why is it people fondest of quoting the situationists never seem to understand them.
 
revol68 said:
He didn't mean that you should reduce politics to going on about your feelings.

Everyday life isn't just your emotions, some private sphere.

Why is it people fondest of quoting the situationists never seem to understand them.
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Ah, that was Debord?
 
I'm somewhat shocked by the explicit anti-trans abuse. I know it's been going on among US feminists but had no idea that any men attending an anarchist event in this country would behave like that. Why? Are these just random bigots or are they underpinned by an ideological position (as in the US), anyone know?
 
revol68 said:
Refusing to discuss something because it makes you feel "unsafe" is pathetic, it would be pathetic from a conservative or liberal it's contemptible from supposed radicals and revolutionaries.

I wonder how these people deal with the world outside their political/activist/student union bubbles.
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This x1000
 
newbie said:
I'm somewhat shocked by the explicit anti-trans abuse. I know it's been going on among US feminists but had no idea that any men attending an anarchist event in this country would behave like that. Why? Are these just random bigots or are they underpinned by an ideological position (as in the US), anyone know?
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I would suspect that it was mostly opportunistic. There were trans women amongst the hostile crowd. They were easy to single out and victimise. That certainly means that there was an underlying transphobic prejudice there, but its probably of the common or garden variety found throughout society rather than a specialist political theory of the kind found amongst transphobic variants of radical feminism.
 
rioted said:
People who talk of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints - such people have a corpse in their mouth.
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everyday life not usually an emotion.
 
Nigel Irritable said:
Bookfairtimeline.wordpress.com

Here's the anti-O'Reilly side of the story in considerable detail. It certainly makes the Assangists look like complete dicks.

I note that the unfortunate anarcha-feminist who was so inadequately intersectionalised that she suggested having room to debate sex work and abortion gets listed under "other incidents". In its own way that says more about the drive to delegitimise disagreement running through this form of politics than the main set of incidents.
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I was wondering if and when that was going to arrive on this thread, and what the responses to it would be.
 
Nigel Irritable said:
What's your own view?
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I don't really have much connection to the "anarchist" part, but I do have some to the trans/gender area which was where I came across the report. It sounds like the people concerned were throwing out some unacceptable abuse to me, on first glance, and I'm not sure how further glances would excuse it somehow. While I didn't think anyone here was involved, I'm interested to hear what resulted in a more general sense, if anything at all.
 
A person I trust says that just prior to the incident a number of those involved in the shenanigans had been gleefully discussing "going trolling".
 
FridgeMagnet said:
I don't really have much connection to the "anarchist" part, but I do have some to the trans/gender area which was where I came across the report. It sounds like the people concerned were throwing out some unacceptable abuse to me, on first glance, and I'm not sure how further glances would excuse it somehow. While I didn't think anyone here was involved, I'm interested to hear what resulted in a more general sense, if anything at all.
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Jesus, I should hope that nobody here would be involved in abusing trans women.
 
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