Urban v's the Commentariat

[The Boy]

Diabetic in French is basically the same but in a French accent. Nae worries

edit: On the other hand, if you ask for salt and sauce they look at you funny.

 

[weepiper]

edit: On the other hand, if you ask for salt and sauce they look at you funny.

You don't have to go to France for that, Glasgow's far enough.

 

[The Boy]

You don't have to go to France for that, Glasgow's far enough.

Aye, but they batter their pizza before they deep fry them. Madness.

 

[J Ed]

The staggers says #notallsexwork

 

[DotCommunist]

The staggers says #notallsexwork

thats based on the straw man that opponents of sex work as it stands are not 'expecting a waitress to be empowered'. Thats a construct the author has invented to hang an argument on.

 

[butchersapron]

The staggers says #notallsexwork

Would you be at all surprised to learn that the non-sex sex worker and author of that piece - pandora blake - is oxbridge and a mate of laurie penny?

 

[weepiper]

The staggers says #notallsexwork

aaaargh fuckoff fuckoff fuckoff fuckoff.

 

[DotCommunist]

its also suggesting that people are holding sex work as uniquely above other employment in terms of how it (should) empowers the worker- rather than y'know, the issues surrounding safety from violence, safety wrt health, workplace representation, social stigma, legality, mental health, addiction etc etc

 

[butchersapron]

Chris Morris:

Vulnerable young women who lack the maturity, university education, support network, self-possession and financial safety net may read the media coverage of these 'happy hookers' and buy into the idea of stripping or prostitution as a viable career prospect

Laurie Penny:

Luckily, the amount of heroin I use is harmless, I inject about once a month on a purely recreational basis. Fine. But what about other people less stable, less educated, less middle-class than me? Builders or blacks for example. If you're one of those, my advice is leave well alone. Good luck.

 

[el-ahrairah]

are we still not allowed a class analysis of sex work?

 

[J Ed]

are we still not allowed a class analysis of sex work?

They're all at Oxbridge or LA art galleries aren't they?

 

[frogwoman]

are we still not allowed a class analysis of sex work?

Swerfs

 

[Fozzie Bear]

If leftwingers like me are condemned as rightwing, then what’s left? Tim Lott
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/mainstream-left-silencing-sympathetic-voices

This is a full house - whining in a national paper about being "silenced", some misgivings about identity politics AND support for Spiked.

 

[Belushi]

If leftwingers like me are condemned as rightwing, then what’s left? Tim Lott
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/mainstream-left-silencing-sympathetic-voices

This is a full house - whining in a national paper about being "silenced", some misgivings about identity politics AND support for Spiked.

Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovich, Julie Burchill, Julie Bindel and others have often been at the rough end of this debate, for daring to voice opinions of their own that do not fit the overarching narrative.

lol

 

[butchersapron]

If leftwingers like me are condemned as rightwing, then what’s left? Tim Lott
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/mainstream-left-silencing-sympathetic-voices

This is a full house - whining in a national paper about being "silenced", some misgivings about identity politics AND support for Spiked.

...and mentioning dinner party invites.

 

[butchersapron]

The poor silenced thing is left with only his weekly Guardian column and his op-ed writer position with The Independent.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Also the classic "but I'm only asking questions why are people being so mean to me?" device as used by conspiraloons and trolls the world over.

 

[DaveCinzano]

Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovich, Julie Burchill, Julie Bindel and others have often been at the rough end of this debate, for daring to voice opinions of their own that do not fit the overarching narrative.

lol

The hidden victims

 

[Fozzie Bear]

The twitter groupthink has been digging. This from July 2013



And he wonders why people have a go at him.

 

[frogwoman]

The left forced me to become a tory

 

[Brainaddict]

If leftwingers like me are condemned as rightwing, then what’s left? Tim Lott
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/mainstream-left-silencing-sympathetic-voices

This is a full house - whining in a national paper about being "silenced", some misgivings about identity politics AND support for Spiked.

This is one of the most confused pieces of writing I've seen anywhere. Congrats to the guardian for having a major columnist with the knowledge and arguing skills of a poor Fox News presenter.

 

[el-ahrairah]

The left forced me to become a tory

give it a decade and i bet you that LP and OJ will be using similar arguments.

 

[frogwoman]

give it a decade and i bet you that LP and OJ will be using similar arguments.

I think they kind of already are.

 

[J Ed]

I have never, ever read such smug, self-serving and dishonest bullshit as that vomit from Tim Lott. Why are dickheads like that allowed to live?

 

[J Ed]

Oh the true left now is to be found battling over those key issues facing the working-class like fag packets and gamergate while wearing George W Bush baseball caps. I wonder what it's like to get an actual narcotic high from your own farts, can someone with twitter ask Tim Lott?

 

[SpineyNorman]

I have never, ever read such smug, self-serving and dishonest bullshit as that vomit from Tim Lott. Why are dickheads like that allowed to live?

Because I only ever see them when I haven't got my gun

 

[J Ed]

The 1 Percent’s White Privilege Con: Elites Hold 'Conversations' about Race, while Resegregating Our Schools The white privilege conversation is good business and P.R. for the wealthy. But look more closely at their actions.

There’s even an annual “White Privilege Conference,” which is being held this year at Dalton School (tuition: $41,350). More and more private schools, according to the Times, “select students to attend” that conference. These students are so select (and these schools so selective) that they have to be selected to attend a conference on their selectedness.

 

[J Ed]

So apparently this is actually a thing

Okay, well, now Starbucks is planning on starting a national dialogue on race that will consist of talking to your Starbucks barista, about race. What are you doing, Starbucks? What? Are? You doing?

No? No. Yes, this is a real thing reported by many of our nation's top news outlets, and here are the facts that you need to know in order to avoid experiencing what could be one of the most painfully awkward interactions of your life with a random Starbucks barista:

1. This thing is called "Race Together." What the fuck does that mean? Nothing, speaking objectively.

2. This thing is a partnership between Starbucks and USA Today, the dream team of American multiculturalism.

3. This thing, as far as we can tell, will consist of you walking into a Starbucks and ordering a coffee, and the barista surprising you by scrawling the words "RACE TOGETHER" on your coffee cup, and then, as if you had just hit some sort of awful jackpot, this Starbucks barista will somehow "engage" you in "conversation" about race in America, while you are there, at the Starbucks.

4. Jesus.

5. Why is this bizarre corporate charade, which sounds even more demeaning than McDonald's asking you to dance for your Egg McMuffin, happening at all? It is happening because weird zillionaire Starbucks CEO and woefully misguided do-gooder/ self-aggrandizer Howard Schultz has determined that the best way for him, a powerful business titan and billionaire, to affect America's race problem is by instructing his enthusiastic minions to confront startled latte buyers with provocative queries about race. Schultz views this plan as "an opportunity to begin to re-examine how we can create a more empathetic and inclusive society – one conversation at a time."

However, we get a good response in this interview...

When I first read about this #RaceTogether thing, I thought it was a joke. It’s like something from ClickHole. But as seemingly weird as it is, I wonder, is it really coming out of nowhere? Or is it actually in keeping with how the “conversation” about race has been happening for a while — but especially in the Obama years?

It took me a while even to process what this initiative is supposed to mean and how it’s supposed to proceed. So the barista’s supposed to open the conversation by suggesting a racially appropriate drink, or what?

But I think you’re right; it’s not completely off-the-wall. In a way, I think this may reflect a facet of the triumph of a way of thinking about race that’s appropriate to neoliberalism, in the sense that it’s disconnected from concerns about hierarchy and from concerns about economic inequality.

In that sense, the ideal of diversity is an expression equivalent to neoliberal individualism in how we’ve come to think about race and social justice — the triumph of recognition over redistribution, the triumph of celebration over compensation; it’s all that kind of stuff.

I also found this bit interesting

Another weird element to the #RaceTogether project, I thought, was the way it tried to increase (and outsource) a kind of emotional labor onto the Starbucks staff. According to Fortune, about 40 percent of Starbucks’ workforce is comprised of racial minorities; so now in many places not only are Starbucks workers going to have to pretend they enjoy handling long lines of grumpy people who just want their coffee, but they’re also going to have to do the work of talking about race to assuage the guilt — I guess? — of their customers, many of whom are white.

I think that’s a very good point. In fact, I mentioned to a trade union activist friend of mine that I was going to be talking to you today, and I sent him the link to [the Starbucks announcement], stuff and his immediate response was, Why doesn’t Starbucks encourage a conversation about wages, health care benefits, or working conditions? I wish I could say that I find this particular kind of self-righteousness and myopia to class inequality astounding, but it’s been around for too long now. I find it the equivalent of astounding in the brazenness of the oversight.

I mean, I get what they mean here. While working in call centres my continued employment has been dependent on actively defending the private healthcare insurance schemes and bank accounts owned by irate customers to them and people in my job were trained to defend those products in very ideological ways couched in neoliberal terminology. Is this really that different? I have to say that that was the first thing that occurred to me when I heard about this race together nonsense, that it is not a million miles away from what millions of people are required to do every day anyway.

 

[rekil]

A new New Inkwirry? Nein danke.

Across literary form and theoretical loyalty, obsessed with politics, economics, art and the (post)(anti)human, Salvage declares for austere revolutionary pessimism.

Salvage-Marxism embraces the Socialist rococo, the feel-good where we can and the feel-bad where we must, the utopian and the unflinching. Salvage will bring together the work of those who share a heartbroken, furious love of the world, and our rigorous principle: Hope is precious; it must be rationed.

(Just saw that fozzie had already posted this on the SWP thread )

 

[Sue]

A new New Inkwirry? Nein danke.

Socialist rococo...