Taken down by an amusingly spiteful Jonathan Liew with salient points to make.
While Barton’s empty intellectual shtick was just that, his misogynistic rants are symptomatic of something more sinister
www.theguardian.com
Like a catchy maxim ripped from the pages of the philosophy books that he has almost certainly only skim-read, the tale of
Joey Barton can be interpreted pretty much however you want.
not least because of the additional emotional labour that many women in football have felt obliged to perform in the days since: defending their positions, defending their colleagues, defending their right simply to earn a living against a loud lunatic fringe with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of time, self-hatred and burner accounts.
Enough now. This is a male problem, and to be quite honest men have been shirking the hard work on this for far too long. And it is very specifically a football problem, even if, in his shameless grift, the 11-minute one-cap wonder is clearly channelling the same far-right talking points as more seasoned online contrarians such as Andrew Tate and Russell Brand and that
Tory MP with the Rick Parfitt wig whose name I always forget
How does Barton become a champion of the disgraced “alt-right” fantasist Alex Jones?
Very little of the actual content is worth addressing in any kind of detail, but there is a common worldview at work here: not coherent by any stretch but devastatingly clear in its emotional impetus, i
ts determination to see darkened enemies everywhere. The world is not what we were told it was. We were all lied to. And I – the disaffected middle-aged man, society’s last permissible victim – am the last hope against the total collapse of humanity.
Why would Barton try to rebrand himself in the cloaks of mainstream far-right populism? Perhaps the more operative question is: why wouldn’t he? This is a man whose lust for controversy and attention has been indulged and encouraged at every turn: often by a largely middle-class media for whom the ability to quote fortune-cookie fragments of Nietzsche or Viktor Frankl was interpreted as some kind of noble redemption arc.
(the only bit Liew misses out here is a direct dig at his own employers, The Guardian, who were very much part of that rehabilitation of Barton - perhaps that got subbed out)
So, yes: by all means ignore Barton if you must. If that’s what helps you get through the day. But by the same token something really quite sinister is happening here, a gathering movement of disaffected young men emboldened by our current political moment, of which Barton is merely an opportunistic symptom.
It begins with a throwaway comment about women on the telly. With an easily muted jibe at the Lionesses. History tells us it never ends that way.
Tl;dr? - Barton is a cunt. But not an insignificant cunt when taken in the context of what is happening in the wider world of the alt-right and the internet.
can't get away with that, can he?
