Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Urban v's the Commentariat

Who the fuck is that with him?

And is it just me or does that medallion looks a bit photo-shopped?
 
35A0327F00000578-3656375-Richard_posing_as_Ali_G_on_an_episode_of_This_Morning-m-122_1466869898935.jpg
 
Novara Media's content from the Labour Party conference and The World Transformed thing is so obsequious it's unwatchable.

For me a lot of it just isn't very good. Some of what they put out is OK, although it tends to be ok in spite of itself because they have someone good on who they are interviewing, but they have just taken an opportunity for some really good media output and fucked it up.

They seem to be growing a lot though so maybe I'm just not the target audience.
 
Also I notice that Paul Mason hasn't expanded on his 'Corbyn gov needs to drone bomb Helmand to implement real socialism' line at the conference as far as I can tell.
 
Novara are just a bunch of wannabe celebrity journos. No depth, no analysis, just a desperate audition for "Comment is Free"

Went to their TWT thing about anti fascism. Properly cringeworthy
 
Novara are just a bunch of wannabe celebrity journos. No depth, no analysis, just a desperate audition for "Comment is Free"

Went to their TWT thing about anti fascism. Properly cringeworthy

I used to quite enjoy listening to their radio a while ago, it was a bit autonomist-lite kind of politics, but had some interesting output and discussion sometimes I thought. Over the last couple of years they've got increasingly fixated by Paul Mason/Labour/etc. and seem to have moved much more into 'pure journalism' rather than political reporting and analysis as well as jettisoning their more radical positions.

Out of them all I think Ash Sarkar often seems to have a better political perspective than some of the others, and that Michael Walker does my head (class war social democrat?!) in whereas Bastani does just seem to want to be a Paul Mason with a slightly better dress sense.
 
Last edited:
For me a lot of it just isn't very good. Some of what they put out is OK, although it tends to be ok in spite of itself because they have someone good on who they are interviewing, but they have just taken an opportunity for some really good media output and fucked it up.

They seem to be growing a lot though so maybe I'm just not the target audience.
Do they still always do things in peedie lists? 5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS PRETTY COMPLEX SUBJECT ACTUALLY. Ah man I had to stop reading for my BP.
 
My God Tawney! What next the webbs? That technocratic behind the scenes lever pulling thing he mentions as regards the move into social-democratic scandanavian post-capitalism led by the goiverner of the bank of england is v reminiscent of them. And that Jan Valtin book has been exposed as a work of fiction so many times now.
 
This from marina Hyde is hilarious - the bit where she grudgingly fakes finding the in jokes of the cobynite left funny so she can then spend the last third of the article accusing them of not being able to take a joke themselves like what she can is fab.
 
This from marina Hyde is hilarious - the bit where she grudgingly fakes finding the in jokes of the cobynite left funny so she can then spend the last third of the article accusing them of not being able to take a joke themselves like what she can is fab.

The graunid articles where they are pretending not to hate the left while adding in not-so-subtle digs at the left are the best.
 
Seriously - mason's recommendations for understanding modern society and what's happening is a mild mannered christian fabian from 100 year ago and a fake memoir about stuff nearly a hundred years ago. This post-capitalism sure is a bit old-fashioned.
 
Seriously - mason's recommendations for understanding modern society and what's happening is a mild mannered christian fabian from 100 year ago and a fake memoir about stuff nearly a hundred years ago. This post-capitalism sure is a bit old-fashioned.

Seems to me like he is just name dropping obscure people in the hope that no one knows what he is on about but will sound suitably impressed. I certainly haven't heard of anyone who he is mentioning here, though I do know about or at least of Fabian Christians.
 
Seems to me like he is just name dropping obscure people in the hope that no one knows what he is on about but will sound suitably impressed. I certainly haven't heard of anyone who he is mentioning here, though I do know about or at least of Fabian Christians.
Tawney would be like the Toynbee of his day - but with a proper solid intellectual background. It's just bizarre to call him up. Valtin was one that anyone who was in he non-swp left groups when mason was a developing politically would know - the SP even re-published his book. It says to me that despite the up-to-date front he tries to put on he's really using the exact same tools and in the same way as when he was in workers power.
 
Aaron fightin' with the Kingster.



kingster said:
Ms. Kuenssberg’s trolls are also as likely to come from the left as the right — as are other critics of her work. Her reporting, as well as that of many other BBC journalists, is the subject of constant critique on a wave of new left-wing websites, such as The Canary, Evolve Politics and Novara Media.
 
Seriously - mason's recommendations for understanding modern society and what's happening is a mild mannered christian fabian from 100 year ago and a fake memoir about stuff nearly a hundred years ago. This post-capitalism sure is a bit old-fashioned.

Mason reminds me of articul8 . That same mix of unbridled enthusiasm (with lack of analysis), references to concepts and theories he obviously hasn't digested, and that crypto-Fabianism (which both would deny, but which is obvious to anyone outside "the bubble").
 
Tawney would be like the Toynbee of his day - but with a proper solid intellectual background. It's just bizarre to call him up. Valtin was one that anyone who was in he non-swp left groups when mason was a developing politically would know - the SP even re-published his book. It says to me that despite the up-to-date front he tries to put on he's really using the exact same tools and in the same way as when he was in workers power.

I think he's hoping no-one has read Tawney - after all, he's not on academic book lists anymore - so he can get away with referencing him. It's like referencing Hoggart or T.H. Marshall - solid but now obscure intellectuals.
 
What's the point in posting 7 year old tweets? :confused: They're not supposed to 'age well' are they.
Because the pallyness of Penny and Yiannopoulos is significant, with mutual back-slapping articles produced by each of them over the years, right up until last year, well after Gamergate and the rise of the alt-right.

As he wrote in 2012, “Obviously, I loathe everything the woman writes, but she’s a nice, middle-class girl whose schtick happens to be Left, where mine is Right. She’s entirely unlike nasty pieces of work such as Johann Hari or the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan...”
 
Back
Top Bottom