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Urban v's the Commentariat

It's probably just as well that American parts of the Anglophone "commentariat" don't get much traction here. There is a whole genre of "I like to think I'm a radical, but..." apologetics for Clinton that would probably cause this place to collectively shit its pants with rage.
 
The Thatcher Problem

In the current US Democratic primaries, the issue of whether Hillary Clinton is really a feminist has been ferociously debated, and the conclusion appears to be that she is not. In fact, despite Clinton’s strong record of supporting abortion rights and equal pay, the verdict of many American pundits is that Bernie Sanders would be the true feminist candidate (as if the most radical possible outcome would be another white man in charge). This is, of course, another double-bind for women: it is beyond facile to pretend that Clinton would be more popular for being more feminist, when any woman quoting Dworkin on the stump would be guaranteed an electorally toxic “feminazi” tag.

Women do not deserve to exercise power only on the condition that we would do it “better” than men and promote the feminist cause. Women have the right to political office exactly as men do, and that means that we can do it well or badly, feministly or unfeministly – just as men have been doing for millenia. Women are entitled to be wrong and mediocre sometimes. Being wrong and mediocre is part of the human condition, and women are allegedly human. At the despatch box or in the boardroom, we should have our fair share because it’s simply a matter of justice. Until we have our fair share, we have no idea how the normalising of female power might change the world; but we don’t have to change the world to merit our half of it.

Can anyone decipher this from the New Statesman?

First paragraph says it is crucial to recognise Clinton is a feminist. Paragraph following says it neither interests nor concerns me about the type of women - feminist or non-feminist - at the top, so long as women have half the positions of political power.
 
sihhi said:
The Thatcher Problem

In the current US Democratic primaries, the issue of whether Hillary Clinton is really a feminist has been ferociously debated, and the conclusion appears to be that she is not. In fact, despite Clinton’s strong record of supporting abortion rights and equal pay, the verdict of many American pundits is that Bernie Sanders would be the true feminist candidate (as if the most radical possible outcome would be another white man in charge). This is, of course, another double-bind for women: it is beyond facile to pretend that Clinton would be more popular for being more feminist, when any woman quoting Dworkin on the stump would be guaranteed an electorally toxic “feminazi” tag.

Women do not deserve to exercise power only on the condition that we would do it “better” than men and promote the feminist cause. Women have the right to political office exactly as men do, and that means that we can do it well or badly, feministly or unfeministly – just as men have been doing for millenia. Women are entitled to be wrong and mediocre sometimes. Being wrong and mediocre is part of the human condition, and women are allegedly human. At the despatch box or in the boardroom, we should have our fair share because it’s simply a matter of justice. Until we have our fair share, we have no idea how the normalising of female power might change the world; but we don’t have to change the world to merit our half of it.

Can anyone decipher this from the New Statesman?

First paragraph says it is crucial to recognise Clinton is a feminist. Paragraph following says it neither interests nor concerns me about the type of women - feminist or non-feminist - at the top, so long as women have half the positions of political power.
Click to expand...

Looks like you've deciphered it well enough by yourself. :)
 
Ditum doesn't have the sophistication of the best right-wing liberal feminist apologists for Clinton, the likes of Rebecca Traister, but her views would fit right in with the dross churned out by more run of the mill Clinton apologists of the Amanda Marcotte type. That particular piece is somewhat confused, but two underlying points can be extracted from it: (1) Clinton is a feminist because she cares about two feminist issues Ditum prioritises. Her record on other feminist issues, like helping to impoverish what Clinton memorably called "welfare queens" or bombing brown women are not worth taking into account. (2) Even if she isn't a feminist, she's still a woman and as with Thatcher that's good enough for Ditum. It isn't good enough for the left, than the left itself isn't good enough for Ditum. Although why Ditum concerns herself with a left she has little obvious political connection to in the first place remains a mystery.
 
The two links above are to a typically stupid New Yorker article by a smug liberal supporter of Hillary Clinton and to a complete evisceration of that first article. The second piece concludes:

Corey Robin said:
But that’s all incidental. What really strikes the reader is just how removed Schwartz is from the experiences of her generation, how utterly clueless she is about the economic hardships so many young men and women face today.

It’s true that Schwartz graduated from the tony Brearley School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $43,000) in 2005 and Yale (annual tuition, fees, and costs: $65,000) in 2009, whereupon, after a few detours, she landed a spot at The New Yorker, from which she reports on Paris (cost: priceless).

But does she have no friends or relatives who are struggling with student debt, low-paying or nonexistent jobs? Has she not read an American newspaper or magazine in the last twelve months? Is the cognitive divide between the have’s and the have-not’s that stark, that extreme?

Whatever the case may be, the Sanders campaign has brought that divide to light. We officially live in a world, to paraphrase Bob Fitch, where 90% of what goes on at The New Yorker can be explained by vulgar Marxism.
Click to expand...
 
I am very ill so I have gone through some old stuff to take my mind off my chest, so pointless game:- guess the commenter

A) To sit in Pizza Express eating a pizza is to partake in a mystic communion with the cosmopolitanisation of the British bourgeois in a way that no other chain-restaurant experience quite achieves.

B) I hope no U-turn on EMA. Was given to 50% of 6th-formers. Are half of British parents unable/unwilling to provide? Bred dependency culture.

C) [On refugees]
They live in twilight ghettos in Hackney, Brent, Lewisham and Hounslow. They lodge with friends. They are exploited. I hate the idea of a two-tier citizenship but that is the price these people must pay for taking refuge in London.
 
sihhi said:
I am very ill so I have gone through some old stuff to take my mind off my chest, so pointless game:- guess the commenter

A) To sit in Pizza Express eating a pizza is to partake in a mystic communion with the cosmopolitanisation of the British bourgeois in a way that no other chain-restaurant experience quite achieves.
Click to expand...

Blates Will Self.

B) I hope no U-turn on EMA. Was given to 50% of 6th-formers. Are half of British parents unable/unwilling to provide? Bred dependency culture.
Click to expand...

Sounds like either Janet Daley or Melanie Philips.

C)
Click to expand...
On refugees
They live in twilight ghettos in Hackney, Brent, Lewisham and Hounslow. They lodge with friends. They are exploited. I hate the idea of a two-tier citizenship but that is the price these people must pay for taking refuge in London.
Click to expand...

Peter Hitchens.
 
A is Will Self. B is The Times's working-class heritage pro-Labour columinst Janice Turner. C is pro-migration Simon Jenkins.

How about this:-

This much is clear: with her brave agenda, Short has emerged as one of the meatiest political thinkers of the present government.
Popular with the electorate, with the party and with both Blair and Brown, her future in the Cabinet seems assured. Unimaginable only a few years ago, promotion to one of the top jobs now seems a distinct possibility (though it is hard to imagine her leaving her beloved Department for International Development). Indeed, it looks as if Clare Short will go down in history as the woman who spearheaded an agenda that liberated millions from poverty. The scope and nobility of her aspirations are remarkable in an era when politicians are reduced to mere managers. I will stick my neck out and predict that Clare Short will come to be remembered as that rare thing in British politics: a heroine.
 
Beyoncé Slays Black People

One evening in September 2015, I sat down to watch the season premier of Doctor Who. What I saw disturbed me. Beginning with the opening scene, Black men were repeatedly killed within moments of appearing on screen. It was the old Black guy dies first trope. I was mad, pausing the show to mutter to myself about racism and decide if I’d continue watching.

That same night, a friend’s brother was murdered in Chicago. He didn’t even make it to 30. I called my friend the day I got the news. I could hear the devastation in his voice, each labored breath almost choking the words out of him as we talked. “Chicago spares no one,” he lamented.

The separation between life and death is at the same time a chasm and a small crack. I had to stop watching a TV show for a few minutes; my friend’s brother had to stop living. The juxtaposition brought into stark relief one notion in particular: there’s a big difference between representation and reality. Unfortunately, as the latest round of internet hysteria following Beyoncé’s new video “Formation” demonstrates, many would-be pundits recognize no such distinction.


A textual analysis of a Beyoncé video tells us almost nothing of the political conditions facing actually existing Black people, regardless of how “Black” one believes its content to be.

“I think parts of this video are as radical a seeding of visionary futures as the lunch counter sit-ins,”one author says. Wait a minute. The lunch counter sit-ins actually happened. They weren’t a music video, and they weren’t a cultural representation. The sit-ins shut down businesses and sometimes even whole towns, upending day-to-day realities in the fight against racial segregation. People got hurt. It’s beyond me how those insurgent events can be favorably compared with a Beyoncé song that says “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.”


Adolph Reed, Jr., in his book Class Notes, explains that these writers deal in “cultural politics.” Their claims are predicated on the premise “that interpreting literary texts is identical with interpreting the wider world.” This falsehood is what allows them to strip actual political events of all context in order to create a false parity with pop culture representations—say, for instance, equating a Beyonce video with the sit-ins.

Reed concludes that this fallacy “empties the idea of political action of all meaning.” Most crucially, he dispels the common assumption that class and identity politics are opposing, mutually exclusive ideologies:
Click to expand...
 
I can't see any mention of this on the thread so far. There's a bloke called Daniel Voshart - I don't know anything about him other than that he doesn't like vice very much.

Anyway, since Vice have been a target on this thread I thought I'd mention that he's done some very interesting digging around the organisation (more than just finding out murdoch has his fingers in it) and it looks even dodgier than I at least ever thought.

Here's one of his bigger pieces with links to more of his stuff in the text:

Vice Media Kit— WARNING for Advertisers — Thoughts on Media

more of his stuff here

not vice
 
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