Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
People who know the correct buzzwords and know the rules of the game, certainly.
Urban v's the Commentariat
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People who know the correct buzzwords and know the rules of the game, certainly.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
Can't find a list of motions anywhere, just bemusement on various blogs.
Here is a discussion of the jazz hands thing from one of the originators of the request to stop clapping:
http://oxfordstudent.com/2015/03/25...uccessful-derailing-of-nus-womens-conference/
Here is a discussion of the jazz hands thing from one of the originators of the request to stop clapping:
http://oxfordstudent.com/2015/03/25...uccessful-derailing-of-nus-womens-conference/
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
i guess what it's saying is that certain manners of clothing are proscribed to certain people, because sex, gender, and clothing, are all the same thing.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
This guy is getting all huffy about a motion about a universal basic income, the abolition (or rather "abolishment") of prisons and the not appropriating black women stuff and seems to reproduce the actual motions:
http://thebackbencher.co.uk/revealed-the-outrageous-demands-from-nus-womens-conference/
http://thebackbencher.co.uk/revealed-the-outrageous-demands-from-nus-womens-conference/
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
i wonder if they intend to have "modesty police" to make sure everyone is appropriately dressed at all times.
fractionMan
Custom Title
fucking hell, that jazz hands thing takes the biscuit. Are these people real?
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
Novara were banging on about how the NUS has abandoned the demand for free higher education. You'd imagine that would make a huge difference to women as well and is possibly a more relevant campaigning issue of the NUS than abolishing prisons.
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
They've had a conference where they've decided not to campaign about anything big. Presumably it's a lot easier to declare victory in the war on men-inappropriately-dressed-as-women than it is to actually take on the same government that they all hope to be members of in a few years.
The NUS has been a bunch of despicable politico cowards for a long time. Abandoning the last campaigning issue that actually means something renders it all but pointless.
The NUS has been a bunch of despicable politico cowards for a long time. Abandoning the last campaigning issue that actually means something renders it all but pointless.
Idris2002
Stay Alive in '25
I'm reading it as "we want to be like the cool kids in the USA".
andysays
Love and solidarity
Quite apart from the question of how exactly clapping might trigger anxiety in a widespread or significant way, there is a certain irony in having a policy to stop (presumably) "white" people appropriating "black" culture alongside a proposal to adopt jazz hands as the alternative to clapping.
Looks to me like the most dangerous type of behaviour is introducing ill-considered motions which make you into a laughing stock...
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
What really annoys me is that the previous turn inwards towards policing individual behaviours rather than seeking to change society came after a series of defeats and so a period of retreat, but those defeats only came about because of great battles - what battles have these clowns lost, or been involved in? This is the defeat this time around isn't it?
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I think the closest thing to a "great battle" would be the student movement of 2010, the defeats obviously being £9k fees being introduced, EMA abolished, etc. That movement lasted all of three months, occasionally looked like it had the potential to reemerge in various places on a smaller scale, but ultimately came to nothing. But thats a bout it.
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
Has the NUS nationally ever been involved in a great battle, though?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
The original fight against tuition fees in the late 80s i suppose - that was largely swallowed up by anti-poll tax stuff if i remember right, and the number of students was a lot smaller then and the role of students less central to society/state. I wasn't really on about just the NUS though - more the wider left and the reaction of many to the defeats of the 70s and early 80s.
Fozzie Bear
Well-Known Member
The first proper argy bargy demo I went on was an NUS one against the introduction of tuition fees in late 1988.
A big march with a huge breakaway that attempted to head over Westminster bridge whilst parliament was sitting. We got charged by police horses and a few hundred of us later marched down to Bow Street to demand the release of people arrested.
Admittedly a lot of this was not what the NUS itself had planned but there was wider politicking at the time too and I did get the sense that there was a united campaign against fees being introduced.
A big march with a huge breakaway that attempted to head over Westminster bridge whilst parliament was sitting. We got charged by police horses and a few hundred of us later marched down to Bow Street to demand the release of people arrested.
Admittedly a lot of this was not what the NUS itself had planned but there was wider politicking at the time too and I did get the sense that there was a united campaign against fees being introduced.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Yes, i got involved despite not being a student and being a bit of an anti-student dick at the time. It was quite exciting because a lot of the people involved hadn't been through the leftist grind - they didn't know, for example that you weren't allowed go and block off all the traffic into broadmead (main shopping centre in bristol) after secretly organising kids to all walk out one afternoon.
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emanymton
A cat politely sat on the flaming gardener.
Isn't this still the legacy of those defeats though?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
"The backbencher", besides creating a neologism, is a dick. they haven't called for "the abolition of prisons", but for the abolition of the "prison-industrial complex", which is an entirely different set of issues.
The rest of the statement and motion is entirely uncontroversial.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Of course, they partially set the context for it - but this stuff is viewed and theorised by these clowns as victories, as successful resistance. As winning.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
It's not about abolition of prisons, it's about the abolition of the current "prison-industrial" system that extracts surplus value from inmates, with all the implications for "justice" that doing so has. it's fairly "vanilla".
Sure, it's a "demand" that seems completely devoid of context though. To me, at least. It just seems LARP-y: we've read our Angela Davis and know about past struggles, so let's emulate them.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
More than anything else, the NUS has served as a "nursery" for the sort of self-interested, self-obsessed members of the political class who formed the younger cohort of "new Labour". They have little interest in actual confrontational action (remember the NUS wankshaft during the student riots disavowing the riots?), but plenty of interest in posturing and preening.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
david widgery described it, more than 40 years ago, as the students' muffler, while it has long been known as No Use to Students.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I think that it's more that the issues around the incarceration of women do STILL need to be challenged (people were bringing info such as what they state in the "we believe" section of the motion to light back in the '80s, for all the good it did), and that the context with regard to "abolition" is that "the prison industrial complex" can impact especially-harshly on women inside the system. That's pretty uncontroversial, and very much a staple of criminological and sociological studies of the impacts of imprisonment in the UK and in the US.
And sure, while waving their supposed erudition in peoples' faces is cringeworthy and easily spottable, that's not to say that they don't have a point.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Had very little to do with the hierarchy of the NUS, though, who went all-out to show that they weren't involved, until they realised that non-involvement might cost them.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
more like 'the closest thing to a "great bottle"...'
Idris2002
Stay Alive in '25
Won't argue with this, then. As I said, I'm not pro-prison (and that particular blog was nasty right-wing shit), I just didn't see any context for that particular motion.
Yeah, but I didn't see butchersapron's post as being purely about the NUS. I was just saying you can look at what's happening in student politics now as part of that defeat in 2010.
Also despite being a student and a member of the NUS (only two months left of that, mind), I've never really understood the internal NUS structure. Watching from afar though, it seems there are plenty of noisy "radicals" willing to shout out loud about how terrible the NUS is (can't argue with that), while also trying to climb into positions of power, taking part in internal conferences, etc. all the time. I don't understand it really.
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