Urban v's the Commentariat

[rekil]

Some blogger, despite appearing to be a bit of a right wing fecker, had a pretty decent go at Laurie over her disgusting smearing of the Charlie Hebdo massacre victims as racist trolls.

https://thegerasites.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/an-open-letter-to-laurie-penny/

My objections to your message are as follows:

1: You force equivalence/balance into the statement via the formulation. Namely: ‘The murderer is wrong but so are the victims.’ It seems to suggest you were incapable, for some reason, of being satisfied merely with condemning Islamist murderers.
2: You reduce Charlie Hebdo’s work to mere ‘trolling’. Under some definitions of trolling this might be accurate but you only ever employ it as a pejorative. I am assuming you have done so here.
3: You chose to distance yourself from those expressing solidarity with them.
4: You deny their heroism.
5: You accuse the dead of being racist. I believe unfairly.

One quibble is that he could've mentioned that she used a Guardian column to make out that a proper creepy nazi hacker weirdo was her idea of an actual hero.

Responding to LP's passive aggressive refusal to account for her filtered through a Richard Seymour sock shittyness ("I don't owe you my attention" etc), the blogger claims "No doubt if a woman had written to you you'd respond." Well that's not strictly true is it?

 

[J Ed]

 

[J Ed]

Remember how Laurie Penny wrote an article denying that gender segregation was happening in UK universities' Islamic Societies and slandered Muslim women who protested against it?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/22/this-isnt-feminism-its-islamophobia

Well, she rowed it back, sort of.

I have spent weary weeks being asked to condemn this "policy of gender segregation" by "Islamic extremists", despite the fact that no such policy exists. Of course, I condemn all sexism within the academy. I condemn segregated drinking societies and the under-representation of women at the top levels of academia. I condemn rape culture on campus, traditions like "seal clubbing" and "slut dropping" where male students are encouraged to sexually humiliate their female classmates. If I've enough breath left, I'll condemn the suggestion that guest lecturers be allowed a segregated audience for religious reasons.

Gender segregation: a bit naughty but still alright, if it's happening, and I am going to pretend it isn't despite all evidence to the contrary.

 

[Jezebelle]

this is something that i've come up against a lot.

you need a class analysis of sex work, and none of those people ever seem to have one. they all think that choice is pure and free.

I don't think that's true of Germaine Greer. I've heard her describe sex work in terms of a world-wide economic necessity for lots of women, many of which need to feed their children one way or another. She also sees it under capitalism as not necessarily different from all the other exploitative, miserable jobs that people do. She says "We are all involved in selling things that shouldn't be sold at all, it's called capitalism". http://critical-discipleship.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/germaine-greer-on-sex-work.html?m=1

 

[rekil]

Laurie reviews 50 Shades of Grey:

http://laurie-penny.com/fifty-shades-of-socialist-feminism/

She's been at the socialist blackface again, and lying about her job description.

I tried to imagine what would happen if someone like me, a feminist investigative journalist, were to actually meet someone like Christian Grey. I named my main character ‘Emma Gold’ after the anarchist feminist philosopher Emma Goldman, who is one of my personal heroes.

 

[DaveCinzano]

I tried to imagine what would happen if someone like me, a feminist investigative journalist, were to actually meet someone like Christian Grey. I named my main character ‘Emma Gold’ after the anarchist feminist philosopher Emma Goldman, who is one of my personal heroes

Gets even better:

“I’ve been to more interesting parties in Brixton.”

 

[el-ahrairah]

the thatcher's dead party was fairly interesting i guess.

 

[el-ahrairah]

I don't think that's true of Germaine Greer. I've heard her describe sex work in terms of a world-wide economic necessity for lots of women, many of which need to feed their children one way or another. She also sees it under capitalism as not necessarily different from all the other exploitative, miserable jobs that people do. She says "We are all involved in selling things that shouldn't be sold at all, it's called capitalism". http://critical-discipleship.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/germaine-greer-on-sex-work.html?m=1

you're quite right - the 'they' in my statement were the people who attempt to no platform her. greer understands the class analysis of sex-work and puts it into its correct context. i also meant that for every middle class escort who has "chosen freely" to go into sex work and finds it releatively safe and profitable, there are half a dozen working class women who are chosing between sex work and starvation, or sex work and violence, who work in unsafe situations for little or no profit. their choices are not free - nor are those women who are pimped out, etc etc. enshrining into law the freedoms of the middle classes is to enshrine into law the abuse of the lower classes, IYSWIM.

 

[frogwoman]

It's also worth mentioning that one of the biggest issues that trans women face is actually economic coercion into sex work and 'transsexual porn' due to prejudice and lack of other options. Don't see the twittersectionalists going on about that tho. I saw a tweet today saying that using the term 'fgm' is actually transphobic

 

[Bakunin]

She's been at the socialist blackface again, and lying about her job description.

Certainly lying about the job description. What investigative hard news has she actually covered? It's hardly Watergate or arms-to-Iran even if there is any. Come to think of it, didn't she whine about her time at the Independent being spent not covering hard news?

Hardly Woodward and Bernstein, now is it?

 

[frogwoman]

Not going out there to be arrested just for journalism

 

[Bakunin]

Not going out there to be arrested just for journalism

I'm sure those many journalists in places where they risk arrest and worse on a daily basis must find that just so inspiring...

 

[el-ahrairah]

I saw a tweet today saying that using the term 'fgm' is actually transphobic

was the thinking behind that apparent?

 

[J Ed]

Media and mainstream political narratives in this country are so devoid of discussions of class that I think that people, particularly people in their mid twenties and younger, have difficulties conceptualising issues through class. People see themselves first and foremost as consumers and second or not at all as workers, which is why (some) customer service staff can spend an entire day being abused in customer service then at the end of day leave work and do the exact same thing to a counterpart in another company.

If class does not factor into your consciousness then how do you look at attempts to criticise sex work? Well, then it's just a restriction on people in the same way as preventing someone from becoming a hairdresser because they are black. Why would you try to restrict the choices of anyone in our market society if not because of some kind of bigotry? It's another neutral choice in a market society in which we are all just making choices. Just like choosing cereal in Tesco.

Also, has anyone else noticed that almost all of these people building their ethical brand as sex workers by defending prostitution are middle-class dominatrices and the like rather than actual prostitutes who have full sex with johns with all the extra risk that entails?

 

[frogwoman]

was the thinking behind that apparent?

No. It's 'cissexist as all hell' apparently. Presumably something about not all women having that anatomy.

 

[weepiper]

No. It's 'cissexist as all hell' apparently. Presumably something about not all women having that anatomy.

That's the same kind of people who think any kind of discussion about periods or endometriosis or any of the other things that genuinely do only affect women born women is transphobic. They can fuck off. I have no tolerance for that sort of nonsense whatsoever.

 

[el-ahrairah]

were they objecting to the procedure because it only affects female children, or objecting to being against it because that campaign excludes trans people. i guess that's the question to understand whether they're an idiot or an actual shit.

 

[frogwoman]

There was a case in the US recently where a woman who claimed sex discrimination because of not being allowed to breastfeed had her case thrown out because 'men can also lactate'

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6653418

 

[frogwoman]

were they objecting to the procedure because it only affects female children, or objecting to being against it because that campaign excludes trans people. i guess that's the question to understand whether they're an idiot or an actual shit.

Objecting to the terminology used to describe it.

 

[el-ahrairah]

fucking hell. that's insane. @ the breastfeeding judgement. as for the terminology thing, i guess they're just an idiot.

 

[frogwoman]

And saying that referring to it as fgm excludes trans people. Im not being funny but they can fuck off. As far as i know they werent saying it was wrong to be against it but its a spectacularly stupid thing to say.

 

[weepiper]

There was a case in the US recently where a woman who claimed sex discrimination because of not being allowed to breastfeed had her case thrown out because 'men can also lactate'

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6653418

jesus mahogany christ.

 

[J Ed]

There was a case in the US recently where a woman who claimed sex discrimination because of not being allowed to breastfeed had her case thrown out because 'men can also lactate'

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6653418

Reactionaries really have cottoned on to this nonsense in recent years which is why you have Blairite students successfully using it to outmanoeuvre left-wing students in the NUS, Lib Dem councillors accusing Syriza of racism (and this being taken seriously by groups like London Black Revolutionaries) and the appropriation of intersectionalist language by MRAs and Gamergaters. They can do this because this 'politics' is so utterly devoid of content and a theoretical basis but at the same time is treated seriously by a vocal minority, people said for years that the right would do it and they have.

 

[frogwoman]

There was also one from the same site altho i can't find the link now, a woman wasn't allowed to go on maternity leave in the US because 'if men could get pregnant we also wouldn't give them maternity leave'

 

[frogwoman]

It's increasingly getting out of hand and being used as a tool to shut people up. J Ed weepiper

 

[frogwoman]

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/brenda...s-has-created-an-army-of-vicious-narcissists/

I don't much like brendan o'neill and some of the language he uses in this piece but some good points made in this.

Identity politics is spreading, filling the chasm where the politics of ideas used to be. Even the general election looks set to be a festival of identity, a less violent form of the communalistic politics we sniffily condemn in places like India. Politicos rarely speak of ‘the electorate’ anymore. Instead, they prefer to change their message depending on which ethnic, gender or generational pocket they’re talking to. Just look at Labour’s pink bus, Operation Black Vote and the Tories wooing of the ‘grey vote’. The end result is implicitly divisive, hinting that the young have different interests to the old, blacks think differently to whites, and women are a distinctive political species.

 

[J Ed]

I would include Spiked in the group of right-wingers who are appropriating identity politics, just for different groups.

 

[frogwoman]

I would include Spiked in the group of right-wingers who are appropriating identity politics, just for different groups.

Indeed.

 

[agricola]

Reactionaries really have cottoned on to this nonsense in recent years which is why you have Blairite students successfully using it to outmanoeuvre left-wing students in the NUS, Lib Dem councillors accusing Syriza of racism (and this being taken seriously by groups like London Black Revolutionaries) and the appropriation of intersectionalist language by MRAs and Gamergaters. They can do this because this 'politics' is so utterly devoid of content and a theoretical basis but at the same time is treated seriously by a vocal minority, people said for years that the right would do it and they have.

This, really. The problem is though that it will always be very easy for them to do it.

 

[Blagsta]

Reactionaries really have cottoned on to this nonsense in recent years which is why you have Blairite students successfully using it to outmanoeuvre left-wing students in the NUS, Lib Dem councillors accusing Syriza of racism (and this being taken seriously by groups like London Black Revolutionaries) and the appropriation of intersectionalist language by MRAs and Gamergaters. They can do this because this 'politics' is so utterly devoid of content and a theoretical basis but at the same time is treated seriously by a vocal minority, people said for years that the right would do it and they have.

London Black Revolutionaries don't half come out with some rubbish on their Facebook page.