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RCP/Spiked/IoI

And when in doubt quote George Orwell despite having never read him
The Bogle • 6 days ago
Isn't PC language the realisation of Orwell's Newspeak and a means of controlling how people speak and by extension how they think? Isn't one aim to limit how we think?
No doubt, like History in "1984", PC-speak will constantly be re-written.
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Nigel Irritable said:
The part I'm most interested in is what happened to the membership outside of the old leadership and their inner circle of hangers on and useful contacts. There were no organised splits. I've very rarely encountered any ex- RCP people around the left. Yet quite a large sect went through a process of abandoning its ideas in favour of a new project, with little head for the existing rank and file. What happened to those people?
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A simple explanation would be that for those 'outside of the old leadership and their inner circle of hangers on and useful contacts' the RCP was a victory of style over content. Unless you were on the inside then there was precious little to hold on to...so you didn't.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice
 
Yep - membership is not really a useful concept to use in relation to RCP. At least if compared with classical small party membership. In fact party isn't really that useful either.
 
youngian said:
And when in doubt quote George Orwell despite having never read him

The Bogle • 6 days ago
Isn't PC language the realisation of Orwell's Newspeak and a means of controlling how people speak and by extension how they think? Isn't one aim to limit how we think?
No doubt, like History in "1984", PC-speak will constantly be re-written.
Click to expand...

Someone hasn't read the Idiot's Guide to the Difference Between Past Events and Future Events.
 
belboid said:
I know one ex member, would probably have left in the early/mid-nineties. Still a leftie, with a slight tendency to be as abstract as possible about issues. I suspect most of them are just too embarassed to mention it to anyone, or have just left political activity entirely.
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I was mildly pally with one of their former members name of Penny Lewis, she's now a lecture in Architecture at Robert Gordon university in Aberdeen. Another of their former members, and certainly from the same time as Lewis, is Dr Stuart Waiton, now a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Abertay in Dundee who is a regular on BBC/STV when various moral panics are being discussed. He has made a bit of a media name for himself over the Offensive Behaviour at Football (and Communications) Act 2012. He's seen as the go to Academic critic of the law.
 
DaveCinzano said:
At risk of sounding like Alanis Morrisette, there is a certain wry humour to be had in O'Neill shilling such nonsense to a right-wing rag such as the Speccy Twat, given that one of the RCP's big things was how political correctness had been, in essence, a right-wing invention mocking the left (and subsequently taken up by municipal liberals in lieu of actually effecting social change). There was a whole conference devoted to the theme in 1993 - ‘The Perils Of Political Correctness’.
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In other words (surely not?!) 'Political Correctness -- My Arse' ;) ... :D

Ie 'PC' was always or mostly made up all along ?

And was only ever attempted to be implemented by idiots, sometimes known as jobsworths, who imagined the media myths about 'PC rules' were true?

I appreciate the above ramblings are recycling of some very old posts on here by me, essentually ... Winterval, Baa Baa White Sheep, 'Christmas banned' etc etc etc etc. Counterfactual history the lot of em ...
 
William of Walworth said:
In other words (surely not?!) 'Political Correctness -- My Arse' ;) ... :D

Ie 'PC' was always or mostly made up all along ?

And was only ever attempted to be implemented by idiots, sometimes known as jobsworths, who imagined the media myths about 'PC rules' were true?

I appreciate the above ramblings are recycling of some very old posts on here by me, essentually ... Winterval, Baa Baa White Sheep, 'Christmas banned' etc etc etc etc. Counterfactual history the lot of em ...
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People were always referred to as [ideologically] sound or unsound in the 80s but were never called "politically correct". But I'm sure you already knew that. :)
 
laptop said:
The thing that startled me most was a man from the Institute of Economic Affairs and Matt Ridley (not yet a Lord) joining in the RCP-cadre banter about armed people's militias, after drink had flowed at an IoI event that I went to check out...
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We're through the looking glass here, people.
 
nino_savatte said:
People were always referred to as [ideologically] sound or unsound in the 80s but were never called "politically correct". But I'm sure you already knew that. :)
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That's right. The whole 'political correctness nonsense' came a bit later, a fictional contrivance, almost never anything other than completely made up, invented by the by the anti-Left and popularised by the (really) right wing media.

ETA : 'Back in the day', "loony lefties' was a more popular media form of abuse against similar targets ...
 
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People that have to keep telling everyone what exciting rebels they are are usually the most predictable fuckers around. This goes not only for Farage but also all the Spiked people and any other similar tiresome controversialists.
 
William of Walworth said:
That's right. The whole 'political correctness nonsense' came a bit later, a fictional contrivance, almost never anything other than completely made up, invented by the by the anti-Left and popularised by the (really) right wing media.

ETA : 'Back in the day', "loony lefties' was a more popular media form of abuse against similar targets ...
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hmm, I had heard (no I can't recall where I read it) that a lot of the PC stuff came from US universities- meant in good faith but adopted and applied in a way that managed to alienate. Not far off the importation of intersectionality.

All google throws up is articles from rw press pushing this line so I may be recalling wrong...
 
Das Uberdog said:
Brendan O'Neill now uncritically interviewing Nigel Farage on sp!ked...

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsit...nt-and-they-hate-me-for-it/16758#.VP-AgvysXU8
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Max Factor couldn't have done a better job.

From that article
Ouch. But Farage’s barely disguised fury with the media is understandable. It’s hard to remember in recent years any other person or thing being the recipient of as much samey, uniform media bashing as Farage.
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I think O'Neill's been living on Pluto for the last 25 years. :facepalm:
 
DotCommunist said:
hmm, I had heard (no I can't recall where I read it) that a lot of the PC stuff came from US universities- meant in good faith but adopted and applied in a way that managed to alienate. Not far off the importation of intersectionality.

All google throws up is articles from rw press pushing this line so I may be recalling wrong...
Click to expand...


Not too sure about that, there's probably some truth in it, but whatever knowledge I have is almost entirely UK-specific (things here were markedly different I think, to what was happening over the Atlantic).
 
Is Tim Lott of the Guardian trying to rehabilitate this tendency here?

If leftwingers like me are condemned as rightwing, then what’s left?

My stance on these issues makes some people in my “tribe” very angry. It is the anger of the pure believer towards the apostate. However, I can find echoes of my populist worldview in one strand of the left – that represented by the Spiked web magazine, which grew out of the ashes of Living Marxism and the Revolutionary Communist party, once known as the libertarian or anti-Stalinist left. Describing their philosophy as radical humanism, they poke and prod at the sacred cows of the left but from a socialist rather than a rightwing populist position. The fact that I enjoy Spiked – although I by no means agree with all of it – feels like dirty little secret. But that’s what the mainstream left specialises in: generating shame.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/mainstream-left-silencing-sympathetic-voices
 
He's not even THAT reactionary IMO -- not about everything anyway! -- but he destroyed whatever his point was (and what exactly was that???) by bigging up Spiked.

Plus this utter straw man of being having his freethinking censored by groupthink. What a pile of made-up shit. If his friends/acquaintances are that censorious, he's got the wrong ones, so he shouldn't fucking judge everyone to the left of Spiked (that's everyone btw!) by that -- there's plenty of other lefties who'd be much better company (in parties/pubs!) and who have far more sense and nuance (and humour) to them, than he does ...
 
I was gonna post this on this or the guardian thread too. Such a pathetic, whiney article:

I am a “lefty”. I have voted Labour all my life. I believe in the abolition of public schools and the inviolability of the NHS, and that the renewal of Trident is a vanity project. I believe the state must work to ensure equality of opportunity for all: women, the LBGT “community”, those with disabilities, those of minority cultures and ethnicities, and the working class. The Guardian has been my newspaper forever. I was glad to see the back of the Sun’s Page 3, and I believe there should be more all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats. I believe immigration is more of a positive force than a negative one.
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What an opening gambit. He's a 'lefty' because he votes labour, 'believes' things and reads the Guardian. What a titan of left...
 
Jeff Robinson said:
I was gonna post this on this or the guardian thread too. Such a pathetic, whiney article:



What an opening gambit. He's a 'lefty' because he votes labour, 'believes' things and reads the Guardian. What a titan of left...
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It reads like a list of clichés; the kinds of clichés that the Right uses to smear the Left. Tories often tend to think that if you claim to be on the Left, then you're a Labour supporter. Fucking morons.
 
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Jollity Farm said:
People that have to keep telling everyone what exciting rebels they are are usually the most predictable fuckers around. This goes not only for Farage but also all the Spiked people and any other similar tiresome controversialists.
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Most Thursdays/Fridays I look back at the week's news and I try and predict Spiked's headlines. I'm almost always right. I like to think that I'm some sort of super psychic like Nostradamus, Russel Grant or Mystic Meg but I'm beginning to doubt my awesome paranormal powers... I suspect you're right, they're the most predictable fuckers around...
 
One very key element of the liberal left has long been under threat: its liberalism – that is, its willingness to debate with anything outside a narrow range of opinions within its own walls. And the more scary and incomprehensible the world becomes, the more debate is replaced by edict and prejudice: literally pre-judging. Identity politics is one of the most significant developments of the last 50 years, but it has led to nerves being exposed in a way they rarely were by economic issues. Because identity is less about politics and more about that most sensitive of human constructions, the protection of the self – both group and individual.

The more scary and incomprehensible the world becomes, the more it is replaced by edict and prejudice

And the more it becomes about the protection of self, the less it becomes about the back and forth of rational argument. All the beliefs, opinions and doubts I hold are just that: they are ideas, not ironclad convictions. I am not certain about any of them, and am quite willing to change my mind, as I have done many times in the past. But I will not alter them if I am faced with invective rather than debate; in fact, they will become more entrenched.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/mainstream-left-silencing-sympathetic-voices

He may be wrong about Spiked, etc, but anyone who has concerns about identity politics and the hold it is getting would concur with much of the above.
 
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