The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
I'm easily amused tbh
Mad Paul Mason
- Thread starter Proper Tidy
- Start date
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
I think he posted as PK or something like that
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
After everything. Having sat and thought it through. By weighing the evidence. This is what Mason comes up with.
I’ve changed my mind. He’s not mad. He’s a massive cunt
I’ve changed my mind. He’s not mad. He’s a massive cunt
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
They massacred 30 000 people in cold blooded revenge. He thinks that...no, that's enough. Fucking hell.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
He was arguing for a "Popular Front" with these people 10 weeks or so ago.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
He still is
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
TBF that is a bit of a mitigating factor, if that is what he was reacting to. "Legitimate voice" ffs.
SpackleFrog
Smash showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts
Paul has a thread and pamphlet for everyone, tweeted last night. It covers:
- why Labour needed to be more Remain
- why Labour should have attacked Russia and crime more
- how he foretold all of this many moons ago
- obligatory defence of Keir Starmer
THREAD: Why Labour lost (from "After Corbynism"). 1/ Fact: Labour lost twice as many voters to Remain parties as to the Tories. It lost them quickly (April-June). It lost them because Corbyn and NEC dithered over Second Referendum/Remain...
https://t.co/yBgdKFOqCr Paul Mason on Twitter
- why Labour needed to be more Remain
- why Labour should have attacked Russia and crime more
- how he foretold all of this many moons ago
- obligatory defence of Keir Starmer
THREAD: Why Labour lost (from "After Corbynism"). 1/ Fact: Labour lost twice as many voters to Remain parties as to the Tories. It lost them quickly (April-June). It lost them because Corbyn and NEC dithered over Second Referendum/Remain...
https://t.co/yBgdKFOqCr Paul Mason on Twitter
rekil
to menny cranks
Novara being a latter day Paris commune is a bit of a leap to say the least. Walker was asking "what mps do you want to see interviewed" the other day. Incendiary stuff.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
I've read the pamphlet.
There are the kernels of some good ideas in it.
But then even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I plan to write much more about this shortly.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I shall read that on my train to work in a bit, doesn't look like it will take long. Might be something in it. What is pissing me off about him though is his blatant attempts at running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He has spent the last few years effectively calling people who don't get behind the project that he now calls tainted from the start political scabs or cowards, whilst at the same time he was also privately plotting against that project with keir starmer, clive lewis and others - and then publicly defending the project with the most left-wing voices he could find who were attempting to embed and extend that project that he actually thought was failing whilst trading off an seeking to establish the idea that he was the brains behind the operation, the eminence grise. I mean i thought multitudinous positionism had been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Ok, some notes/thoughts as i read through it -:
1)The first section is about what happened. The idea is that they lost the election because they lost votes to the lib-dems and the greens and this necessitates a 'progressive alliance' with them. He doesn't say where they lost these votes to them and if they translated into lost seats - which you know, is sort of important to establish. As if establishing if this alliance would win seats. I don't know how he can think of the lib-dems as progressive either. So basically he arguing for a redistribution of votes on a number of untested and i think incorrect assumptions (the lib-dems are interested and that it would be electorally effective).
2) He says the move towards REMAIN saved labour. He says everything is Len Mcluckey's fault for opposing this. He later goes on to say that the move towards REMAIN was done at LM's insistence. This is typical of the twisting involved throughout.
3) He uses the term 'plebian right'
4) He wheels out his mis-use of the Hannah Arendt quote about an alliance of elites and mobs once more, happy to use the rhetorical sheen of it but not the substantive content.
5) W/c in big towns are inherently cosmopolitan, socially liberal, concerned with social justice etc
6) The other more horrible w/c in the north and midlands have 'detached themselves' from labour and its values rather than labour abandoning - or more accurately - attacking the conditions of their existence. Again later on he recognises this started under blair but doesn't mage to connect the two.
7) Skilled w/c simply = remain for him
8) What should have happened to ensure victory was an early bolstered open remain position that the new core membership - 'the skilled and educated workforce, the BAME communities and the youth' - could then have spent the summer evangelising for in the north and midlands where people voted leave and were losing trust in labour. I think this warrants the thread title alone.
9) Trident could have saved us.
The other sections are his usual stuff with a new plea for an internal labour technocracy to direct a new progressive social alliance. It's funny how when things led by people like him/them fail the answer is always a new wider project headed by people like him/them?
Ok, some notes/thoughts as i read through it -:
1)The first section is about what happened. The idea is that they lost the election because they lost votes to the lib-dems and the greens and this necessitates a 'progressive alliance' with them. He doesn't say where they lost these votes to them and if they translated into lost seats - which you know, is sort of important to establish. As if establishing if this alliance would win seats. I don't know how he can think of the lib-dems as progressive either. So basically he arguing for a redistribution of votes on a number of untested and i think incorrect assumptions (the lib-dems are interested and that it would be electorally effective).
2) He says the move towards REMAIN saved labour. He says everything is Len Mcluckey's fault for opposing this. He later goes on to say that the move towards REMAIN was done at LM's insistence. This is typical of the twisting involved throughout.
3) He uses the term 'plebian right'
4) He wheels out his mis-use of the Hannah Arendt quote about an alliance of elites and mobs once more, happy to use the rhetorical sheen of it but not the substantive content.
5) W/c in big towns are inherently cosmopolitan, socially liberal, concerned with social justice etc
6) The other more horrible w/c in the north and midlands have 'detached themselves' from labour and its values rather than labour abandoning - or more accurately - attacking the conditions of their existence. Again later on he recognises this started under blair but doesn't mage to connect the two.
7) Skilled w/c simply = remain for him
8) What should have happened to ensure victory was an early bolstered open remain position that the new core membership - 'the skilled and educated workforce, the BAME communities and the youth' - could then have spent the summer evangelising for in the north and midlands where people voted leave and were losing trust in labour. I think this warrants the thread title alone.
9) Trident could have saved us.
The other sections are his usual stuff with a new plea for an internal labour technocracy to direct a new progressive social alliance. It's funny how when things led by people like him/them fail the answer is always a new wider project headed by people like him/them?
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
butchersapron has just saved me a job.....
I might still write something because Mason is suggesting an 'unmaking of the WC' in the deindustrialised towns of the Midlands, North and Wales (but not in smashed town Scotland) and this needs to be engaged with.
I might still write something because Mason is suggesting an 'unmaking of the WC' in the deindustrialised towns of the Midlands, North and Wales (but not in smashed town Scotland) and this needs to be engaged with.
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
I kept quiet about him during the election, but Paul Mason is a glib fraud. A pissweak imitation of Varoufakis, without the intellect.
Fully expect him to tack towards DiEM25 or some such other megalomaniac formation if the Centrist Dads ‘take back control’ over Labour; and, thereafter, a lifetime of leather-jacketed inconsequence, alongside similar ‘intellectual’ profiles, producing dialectical tracts that no-one wants to read, and with no real-world consequences beyond hollow laughter.
Still he should get a book deal out of it. Wank
Fully expect him to tack towards DiEM25 or some such other megalomaniac formation if the Centrist Dads ‘take back control’ over Labour; and, thereafter, a lifetime of leather-jacketed inconsequence, alongside similar ‘intellectual’ profiles, producing dialectical tracts that no-one wants to read, and with no real-world consequences beyond hollow laughter.
Still he should get a book deal out of it. Wank
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
His role, and that of similar 'thinkers' is of significant importance in the reformulation of the centrist alliance.
His pamphlet is a full frontal attack on the 'pleblain right' scum trapped in the ex-industrial towns of the Midlands, North and Wales. They are a new dangerous class. A class apart from the progressive, multicultural and liberal working class in the cities. They are lost to 'nativism'.
The logical steps for the left to take therefore given the emergence of this group are obvious: socialism without the working class. A new alliance of the liberal middle class and city dwelling, young working class.
The pamphlet to be fair to him is abundantly clear on this point.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
another forest faces destruction to feed his ego
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
Is it going to take more than half a tree?
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
I mean if you intend to win back these lost voters in the next five years, it really is hard to imagine a worse strategy.
Mason and his kind are a liability for Labour, really. I suspect there may be a bit if raging against the dying of the light.
We’re now in a position where we’re leaving Europe and we will all face unprecedented assaults on democracy and workers’ rights with the likely possibility of our economy being re-organised in response to awful trade deals negotiated from a position of beggars’ weakness.
Paul Mason’s bluster is at best, of limited academic interest at this point. A busted flush.
Mason and his kind are a liability for Labour, really. I suspect there may be a bit if raging against the dying of the light.
We’re now in a position where we’re leaving Europe and we will all face unprecedented assaults on democracy and workers’ rights with the likely possibility of our economy being re-organised in response to awful trade deals negotiated from a position of beggars’ weakness.
Paul Mason’s bluster is at best, of limited academic interest at this point. A busted flush.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
You've got this wrong. Mason isn't interested in winning them back - he wants to create the intellectual cover to dump them. He wants to drive a deeper cleavage. He wants to politically 'other' them
Yes, there must be some crumbs thrown to these areas. See his bizarre stuff about nuclear weapons - as though this is what you dream of trapped in a cancelled future in a dead ex-mining village.
But this is about the direction of travel - the new progressive alliance.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i thought someone who like paul mason was paid to observe the political landscape might have noticed that the lib dems are prepared, if not eager, to leap into bed with the tories for power. i don't see how they could ever form part of a left / liberal alliance, when for 30 pieces of silver or less they will sell out every principle they professed to hold sacrosanct.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
Isn't that exactly why they would do it?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
have you been following the lib dem history of saying 'we can't work with this labour leader' over a decade or more?
the lib dems would never enter such an alliance with the labour party or any left / progressive formation, while they are pleased to associate themselves with tories.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
I remember speaking to some a bit before the 2015 election at a point where Ed Miliband was having a little purple patch and they were quite enthusiastic about an anticipated alliance with Labour rather than the Tories in an election they expected to be hung with Labour having the most seats.
(I can't even remember why I was talking to some Lib Dems now. At least one of them was a councillor...)
(the same friend was today saying the only way out of perpetual tory rule is to have a temporary electoral pact between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, with the sole aim of electoral reform)
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
I saw this idea bouncing about my FB feed earlier... think it was once of the "enthusiastic remain" brigade.
sunnysidedown
caput mortuum
The Greens, the party that got into bed with the tory-enablers. what a bunch of frauds.
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