I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the WWC and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
Particularly if you read it in conjunction with that Guardian piece about going to live among The Head Count. Sanders of The River was less sneering....
Sorry, not familiar. This is a piece by him sneering at the working class, is it?
Black Lives Matter, a movement dedicated to racial equality, has provoked the first violent, racially tinged culture war in the history of the UK, and likely enabled the rise of a large, aggressive far right movement able to put large numbers of people on the street, not the normal pitiful crowd.
Brilliant.
They are defintely the smarter of the two though. The Football Lads Alliance didn't have the brains to give themselves a name that meant every soppy, old, white middle class wally felt unable to criticise them no matter what they did.
BLM have been hijacked by some very politically savvy Marxists.
This violent confrontation is exactly what they want, ideally white versus black. They WANT a Fascist party to rise, so they can polarise society and try and bring down the centrist Establishment
Yet the truly striking thing about the wave of protests across the world - which certainly hasn’t been lost upon black people - is the significant involvement of younger white people.
Sadly for the black people protesting genuine grievances, they will quickly discover that many of the young white people have a very different agenda - and see the black protesters simply as a means to their end of smashing up the state.
The more you see this, the more you understand why Malcolm X wanted the white people *not* to join the movement...
Indeed. In the USA particularly, there are huge cultural issues around race, which when combined with gun culture and police culture can lead to what we saw with the death that sparked the protests.
The problems always occur when well-meaning protest groups get highjacked by extremist groups with their own ideologies. It appears that the BLM groups have been ambivalent to more violent far-left groups joining their protest, which inevitably leads to opposition and much confrontation than would otherwise have been the case.
If I were in the position of a black community leader at the start of all this, I would have gone for thousands of people standing in silence, wearing masks and arranged in a grid 2m apart, over the largest space available. It would've been incredibly poignant.
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the WWC and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
Particularly if you read it in conjunction with that Guardian piece about going to live among The Head Count. Sanders of The River was less sneering....
Sorry, not familiar. This is a piece by him sneering at the working class, is it?
No - I forget the ladies name - but it was a perfect example of what he was writing about.
“Yet the problem with the rising left is that it thinks working-class people in a highly diverse society will be able to put aside other allegiances such as race and gender to challenge a neoliberal economy that has, arguably, been pretty friendly to identity politics. There is simply no historical precedent for this kind of alliance, least of all in the New Deal, which Sanders holds up as his social-democratic model. The allegedly class-based politics of the New Deal era depended on social homogeneity and a manufacturing-based economy — neither of which exist today.“
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the working class and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
The last election showed there is very little support for Owen Jones or his politics in working class England.
Sadly not. Variety of reasons for that. Have often given my analysis of GE19 so will not do again here. But his book "Chavs" is imo very good. It shows great insight into, and affection for, the working class. Which he is of course.
Any case we all know who is really sneering at the working class. And there'll be hell to pay when they find out.
Yep the educated left Metropolitan set. They have always sneered at the working classes and their concerns. That is why they were so shocked when the working classes turned on them.
Defenders of a Churchill statue making Nazi salutes. I’m starting to get the impression, just maybe, that they are not quite as clued up about history as they think.
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the working class and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
Given we were talking about Gone With The Wind yesterday I do see parallels with our world.
The plantocarcy are our comfortable middle classes, the slaves are our cheap and servile migrant workers and the poor whites / hillbillies are our white working class.
That analogy gets even sharper when you are in Paris - the "Districts" for the migrants, the deplorables shipped off to the satellite towns...
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the working class and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
Given we were talking about Gone With The Wind yesterday I do see parallels with our world.
The plantocarcy are our comfortable middle classes, the slaves are our cheap and servile migrant workers and the poor whites / hillbillies are our white working class.
It is Brexit rehashed, your a massive racist, because you want to control immigration. And now you are clearly a massive thick racist, because you like Churchill and are proud we won the war about the Nazis.
Stalin also won the war against the Nazis. Do you fetishise Stalin statues too?
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
The extreme right and the extreme left are clearly two sides of the same rotten coin, but what's going on with the demos is a little more complicated. The big BLM protests appear to consist largely of concerned citizens who are more interested in anti-racism than in the anti-
capitalist baggage that some in the movement are also carrying. They then attract the usual fringe of hard left shit-stirrers out to make trouble.
The smaller hard right counter-demos appear to consist entirely of nutters.
The consequence of the behaviour of one mob going unchecked is that, of course, the other feels justified and emboldened.
Pretty much agree. But for me the brutish, overtly racist nastiness of the far right means they clinch the biscuit.
I’m shocked that you reach this conclusion. No doubt you also think the hammer and sickle is not as bad as a swastika.
Correct. For all the very considerable evils that Communist totalitarianism in practice has led to, the Nazi vision of the subjugation of all peoples to the single German master race, and the serious attempt to turn this vision into reality by brute force and genocide, this stands alone.
I think most people, if they think about it properly, will feel the same.
It's not a left v right thing.
Agreed. On the extremes there is not that much difference in scumsucking-ness :-) .
If it helps people on the democratic right to accept the uniquely evil place that Nazism has, and cease the false equivalence with USSR etc, I think it's fair to say that "far right" (in this Nazi sense) is not an extreme extension of right wing politics. You don't move further and further right and end up a Nazi. There's a discontinuity.
Black Lives Matter, a movement dedicated to racial equality, has provoked the first violent, racially tinged culture war in the history of the UK, and likely enabled the rise of a large, aggressive far right movement able to put large numbers of people on the street, not the normal pitiful crowd.
Brilliant.
They are defintely the smarter of the two though. The Football Lads Alliance didn't have the brains to give themselves a name that meant every soppy, old, white middle class wally felt unable to criticise them no matter what they did.
BLM have been hijacked by some very politically savvy Marxists.
This violent confrontation is exactly what they want, ideally white versus black. They WANT a Fascist party to rise, so they can polarise society and try and bring down the centrist Establishment
Yet the truly striking thing about the wave of protests across the world - which certainly hasn’t been lost upon black people - is the significant involvement of younger white people.
Sadly for the black people protesting genuine grievances, they will quickly discover that many of the young white people have a very different agenda - and see the black protesters simply as a means to their end of smashing up the state.
The more you see this, the more you understand why Malcolm X wanted the white people *not* to join the movement...
Indeed. In the USA particularly, there are huge cultural issues around race, which when combined with gun culture and police culture can lead to what we saw with the death that sparked the protests.
The problems always occur when well-meaning protest groups get highjacked by extremist groups with their own ideologies. It appears that the BLM groups have been ambivalent to more violent far-left groups joining their protest, which inevitably leads to opposition and much confrontation than would otherwise have been the case.
If I were in the position of a black community leader at the start of all this, I would have gone for thousands of people standing in silence, wearing masks and arranged in a grid 2m apart, over the largest space available. It would've been incredibly poignant.
I actually think the Blackout Tuesday achieved more than the breaking lockdown protest.
Black Lives Matter, a movement dedicated to racial equality, has provoked the first violent, racially tinged culture war in the history of the UK, and likely enabled the rise of a large, aggressive far right movement able to put large numbers of people on the street, not the normal pitiful crowd.
Brilliant.
They are defintely the smarter of the two though. The Football Lads Alliance didn't have the brains to give themselves a name that meant every soppy, old, white middle class wally felt unable to criticise them no matter what they did.
BLM have been hijacked by some very politically savvy Marxists.
This violent confrontation is exactly what they want, ideally white versus black. They WANT a Fascist party to rise, so they can polarise society and try and bring down the centrist Establishment
Yet the truly striking thing about the wave of protests across the world - which certainly hasn’t been lost upon black people - is the significant involvement of younger white people.
Sadly for the black people protesting genuine grievances, they will quickly discover that many of the young white people have a very different agenda - and see the black protesters simply as a means to their end of smashing up the state.
The more you see this, the more you understand why Malcolm X wanted the white people *not* to join the movement...
Indeed. In the USA particularly, there are huge cultural issues around race, which when combined with gun culture and police culture can lead to what we saw with the death that sparked the protests.
The problems always occur when well-meaning protest groups get highjacked by extremist groups with their own ideologies. It appears that the BLM groups have been ambivalent to more violent far-left groups joining their protest, which inevitably leads to opposition and much confrontation than would otherwise have been the case.
If I were in the position of a black community leader at the start of all this, I would have gone for thousands of people standing in silence, wearing masks and arranged in a grid 2m apart, over the largest space available. It would've been incredibly poignant.
I get the impression that communities in the US are much, much more separated and segregated than in the UK. Even New York, where I have been a lot recently.
I wonder what else 2020 is going to offer us for entertainment. This is fucking brilliant. All we need now is life on Mars and the queen megging it for the full nap hand
The latter means 'deadpool' triumph for me, remember.
It shows how things have changed for the better. When DuraAce`s deadpool thingy was devised I suspect that we thought it would be settled quite quickly. Now we have the glorious outcome of "no winner" as being very possible. Seemed so unlikely. Or at least it did to me.
Black Lives Matter, a movement dedicated to racial equality, has provoked the first violent, racially tinged culture war in the history of the UK, and likely enabled the rise of a large, aggressive far right movement able to put large numbers of people on the street, not the normal pitiful crowd.
Brilliant.
The Notting Hill riots say hi. I think you'll find that black people have been provoking outrage by existing and asking to be treated fairly for quite a while now.
Completely different.
This is a new kind of culture war imported direct from the USA. Arguing against that is pointless.
BLM is also a new kind of religion: there's an excellent essay on it in the Atlantic I think - I'll try and dig it out
Again, I think you will find plenty of historical echoes in the current events. The anti racism movement has always borrowed language, tactics and ideas from the US civil rights movement, where the struggle had deeper roots for obvious reasons. The Bristol bus boycott for instance followed similar tactics by King. (Was it in Montgomery, AL? I can't remember). I bet you had plenty of people back then complaining that we didn't need any of that American nonsense here.
In Notting Hill 1958 it is said to have been black US servicemen who showed residents how to make Molotovs. Oswald Mosley's fascists in the form of the Union Movement (BUF -> BU -> UM) had been encouraging white-racist violence in the area.
In NI in the 1960s both the civil rights movement and the ascendancy types looked to the US for inspiration. (On Ian Paisley, see for example this.)
Training up recent graduates in the company I work for, I am not sure what they are taught. It's not Marxism, but it's not really much of anything else either.
They are especially weak in critical thinking, English grammar and basic mathematics.
That's not to say they aren't talented. They are. They have merely been royally ripped off by the people who have taught them.
If someone had daubed "was a Liberal Unionist" on Churchill's statue, I would have condemned the act of vandalism but would have applauded the sentiment.
Whisper it quietly but we don't actually have a Conservative Government - the current Government is a Liberal Unionist Government calling itself Conservative.
I don't get this one-dimensional characterisation of people. Colston was involved in the slave trade but he was a philanthropist and gave generously to charitable causes. People are complex and contradictory and their motivations and aspirations change through their lives.
Churchill was a great war leader but he was an average politician in peace time. The Conservative Party, which now idolises him, loved him so much they tried to de-select him as an MP.
By some standards, I am a racist xenophobic bigot and it's just as well there are no statues of me anywhere.
The victors write the history and erect the statues - those who come later tear down the statues and re-write the history.
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
The extreme right and the extreme left are clearly two sides of the same rotten coin, but what's going on with the demos is a little more complicated. The big BLM protests appear to consist largely of concerned citizens who are more interested in anti-racism than in the anti-
capitalist baggage that some in the movement are also carrying. They then attract the usual fringe of hard left shit-stirrers out to make trouble.
The smaller hard right counter-demos appear to consist entirely of nutters.
The consequence of the behaviour of one mob going unchecked is that, of course, the other feels justified and emboldened.
Pretty much agree. But for me the brutish, overtly racist nastiness of the far right means they clinch the biscuit.
I’m shocked that you reach this conclusion. No doubt you also think the hammer and sickle is not as bad as a swastika.
Correct. For all the very considerable evils that Communist totalitarianism in practice has led to, the Nazi vision of the subjugation of all peoples to the single German master race, and the serious attempt to turn this vision into reality by brute force and genocide, this stands alone.
I think most people, if they think about it properly, will feel the same.
It's not a left v right thing.
Agreed. On the extremes there is not that much difference in scumsucking-ness :-) .
If it helps people on the democratic right to accept the uniquely evil place that Nazism has, and cease the false equivalence with USSR etc, I think it's fair to say that "far right" (in this Nazi sense) is not an extreme extension of right wing politics. You don't move further and further right and end up a Nazi. There's a discontinuity.
socialism is class based, Nazism race based. The former were content to wipe out whole classes (the Kulaks), the latter races (the Jews).
Black Lives Matter, a movement dedicated to racial equality, has provoked the first violent, racially tinged culture war in the history of the UK, and likely enabled the rise of a large, aggressive far right movement able to put large numbers of people on the street, not the normal pitiful crowd.
Brilliant.
The Notting Hill riots say hi. I think you'll find that black people have been provoking outrage by existing and asking to be treated fairly for quite a while now.
“Yet the problem with the rising left is that it thinks working-class people in a highly diverse society will be able to put aside other allegiances such as race and gender to challenge a neoliberal economy that has, arguably, been pretty friendly to identity politics. There is simply no historical precedent for this kind of alliance, least of all in the New Deal, which Sanders holds up as his social-democratic model. The allegedly class-based politics of the New Deal era depended on social homogeneity and a manufacturing-based economy — neither of which exist today.“
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
The extreme right and the extreme left are clearly two sides of the same rotten coin, but what's going on with the demos is a little more complicated. The big BLM protests appear to consist largely of concerned citizens who are more interested in anti-racism than in the anti-
capitalist baggage that some in the movement are also carrying. They then attract the usual fringe of hard left shit-stirrers out to make trouble.
The smaller hard right counter-demos appear to consist entirely of nutters.
The consequence of the behaviour of one mob going unchecked is that, of course, the other feels justified and emboldened.
Pretty much agree. But for me the brutish, overtly racist nastiness of the far right means they clinch the biscuit.
I’m shocked that you reach this conclusion. No doubt you also think the hammer and sickle is not as bad as a swastika.
Correct. For all the very considerable evils that Communist totalitarianism in practice has led to, the Nazi vision of the subjugation of all peoples to the single German master race, and the serious attempt to turn this vision into reality by brute force and genocide, this stands alone.
I think most people, if they think about it properly, will feel the same.
It's not a left v right thing.
"Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea."
Murderous violence was a feature of both ideologies, not a bug.
But with one of them the vision itself - racial domination - was of the utmost evil and with no redeeming features.
Training up recent graduates in the company I work for, I am not sure what they are taught. It's not Marxism, but it's not really much of anything else either.
They are especially weak in critical thinking, English grammar and basic mathematics.
That's not to say they aren't talented. They are. They have merely been royally ripped off by the people who have taught them.
If someone had daubed "was a Liberal Unionist" on Churchill's statue, I would have condemned the act of vandalism but would have applauded the sentiment.
Whisper it quietly but we don't actually have a Conservative Government - the current Government is a Liberal Unionist Government calling itself Conservative.
I don't get this one-dimensional characterisation of people. Colston was involved in the slave trade but he was a philanthropist and gave generously to charitable causes. People are complex and contradictory and their motivations and aspirations change through their lives.
Churchill was a great war leader but he was an average politician in peace time. The Conservative Party, which now idolises him, loved him so much they tried to de-select him as an MP.
By some standards, I am a racist xenophobic bigot and it's just as well there are no statues of me anywhere.
The victors write the history and erect the statues - those who come later tear down the statues and re-write the history.
Indeed. Perhaps we should have no statues, to anybody!
“Yet the problem with the rising left is that it thinks working-class people in a highly diverse society will be able to put aside other allegiances such as race and gender to challenge a neoliberal economy that has, arguably, been pretty friendly to identity politics. There is simply no historical precedent for this kind of alliance, least of all in the New Deal, which Sanders holds up as his social-democratic model. The allegedly class-based politics of the New Deal era depended on social homogeneity and a manufacturing-based economy — neither of which exist today.“
It is Brexit rehashed, your a massive racist, because you want to control immigration. And now you are clearly a massive thick racist, because you like Churchill and are proud we won the war about the Nazis.
Stalin also won the war against the Nazis. Do you fetishise Stalin statues too?
That argument is on the level of the idiots posting pictures of Churchill when Trump claimed ANTIFA were a far left terrorist organisation.
How fast things have changed, two weeks ago a symbol of anti-fascism, now he is to be cancelled.
Black Lives Matter, a movement dedicated to racial equality, has provoked the first violent, racially tinged culture war in the history of the UK, and likely enabled the rise of a large, aggressive far right movement able to put large numbers of people on the street, not the normal pitiful crowd.
Brilliant.
They are defintely the smarter of the two though. The Football Lads Alliance didn't have the brains to give themselves a name that meant every soppy, old, white middle class wally felt unable to criticise them no matter what they did.
BLM have been hijacked by some very politically savvy Marxists.
This violent confrontation is exactly what they want, ideally white versus black. They WANT a Fascist party to rise, so they can polarise society and try and bring down the centrist Establishment
Yet the truly striking thing about the wave of protests across the world - which certainly hasn’t been lost upon black people - is the significant involvement of younger white people.
Sadly for the black people protesting genuine grievances, they will quickly discover that many of the young white people have a very different agenda - and see the black protesters simply as a means to their end of smashing up the state.
The more you see this, the more you understand why Malcolm X wanted the white people *not* to join the movement...
Indeed. In the USA particularly, there are huge cultural issues around race, which when combined with gun culture and police culture can lead to what we saw with the death that sparked the protests.
The problems always occur when well-meaning protest groups get highjacked by extremist groups with their own ideologies. It appears that the BLM groups have been ambivalent to more violent far-left groups joining their protest, which inevitably leads to opposition and much confrontation than would otherwise have been the case.
If I were in the position of a black community leader at the start of all this, I would have gone for thousands of people standing in silence, wearing masks and arranged in a grid 2m apart, over the largest space available. It would've been incredibly poignant.
I get the impression that communities in the US are much, much more separated and segregated than in the UK. Even New York, where I have been a lot recently.
Go to the deep south and really see what segregation looks like. I told a story on here the other night.
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the working class and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
Telling them that they think wrongly about the likes of Churchill and actually was a war criminal and massive racist fits into that category.
It is Brexit rehashed, your a massive racist, because you want to control immigration. And now you are clearly a massive thick racist, because you like Churchill and are proud we won the war about the Nazis.
Perhaps if you call a man a racist for long enough, he has nowhere to go but to turn around and show you just how racist he can be.
But was Churchill constantly told he was a racist?
It has been the case through history that revolutionaries have been perpetually disappointed by the absence of radicalism amongst the working classes, and protests and revolutions have always been fuelled by what we would describe as middle class younger people, from 1968 back through the French and Russian revolutions. Indeed there is a theory that protest and social unrest tends to peak when there is an excess of supply of aspiring middle class youngsters compared to the number of relatively privileged opportunities that their society is able to offer.
Some even suggest that the slaughter and devastation of the English Wars of the Roses arose simply because the royalty of the time had children and grandchildren way in excess of the number of baronial positions available to them.
Consider the future prospects for younger graduates in the immediate post-COVID society and maybe there is a bigger picture.
Quite.
To paraphrase:
Number of graduates: 400,000, number of graduate jobs: 500,000, result: happiness Number of graduates: 400,000, number of graduate jobs: 100,000, result: misery
The higher education system was saddling a lot of young people with third rate degrees and huge debts, and then leaving them to get by on minimum wage crap jobs, *before* all of this kicked off. There'll be even fewer fulfilling careers available from now on.
Training up recent graduates in the company I work for, I am not sure what they are taught. It's not Marxism, but it's not really much of anything else either.
They are especially weak in critical thinking, English grammar and basic mathematics.
That's not to say they aren't talented. They are. They have merely been royally ripped off by the people who have taught them.
If someone had daubed "was a Liberal Unionist" on Churchill's statue, I would have condemned the act of vandalism but would have applauded the sentiment.
Whisper it quietly but we don't actually have a Conservative Government - the current Government is a Liberal Unionist Government calling itself Conservative.
I don't get this one-dimensional characterisation of people. Colston was involved in the slave trade but he was a philanthropist and gave generously to charitable causes. People are complex and contradictory and their motivations and aspirations change through their lives.
Churchill was a great war leader but he was an average politician in peace time. The Conservative Party, which now idolises him, loved him so much they tried to de-select him as an MP.
By some standards, I am a racist xenophobic bigot and it's just as well there are no statues of me anywhere.
The victors write the history and erect the statues - those who come later tear down the statues and re-write the history.
Indeed. Perhaps we should have no statues, to anybody!
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
The extreme right and the extreme left are clearly two sides of the same rotten coin, but what's going on with the demos is a little more complicated. The big BLM protests appear to consist largely of concerned citizens who are more interested in anti-racism than in the anti-
capitalist baggage that some in the movement are also carrying. They then attract the usual fringe of hard left shit-stirrers out to make trouble.
The smaller hard right counter-demos appear to consist entirely of nutters.
The consequence of the behaviour of one mob going unchecked is that, of course, the other feels justified and emboldened.
Pretty much agree. But for me the brutish, overtly racist nastiness of the far right means they clinch the biscuit.
I’m shocked that you reach this conclusion. No doubt you also think the hammer and sickle is not as bad as a swastika.
Correct. For all the very considerable evils that Communist totalitarianism in practice has led to, the Nazi vision of the subjugation of all peoples to the single German master race, and the serious attempt to turn this vision into reality by brute force and genocide, this stands alone.
I think most people, if they think about it properly, will feel the same.
It's not a left v right thing.
Agreed. On the extremes there is not that much difference in scumsucking-ness :-) .
If it helps people on the democratic right to accept the uniquely evil place that Nazism has, and cease the false equivalence with USSR etc, I think it's fair to say that "far right" (in this Nazi sense) is not an extreme extension of right wing politics. You don't move further and further right and end up a Nazi. There's a discontinuity.
socialism is class based, Nazism race based. The former were content to wipe out whole classes (the Kulaks), the latter races (the Jews).
As I said - if you think about it properly there is no equivalence.
Indeed. Perhaps we should have no statues, to anybody!
Perhaps not - when the Church was the dominant political and moral authority, it had the best stone buildings on which the peasants were forced to work while they lived in wooden huts.
The Tower of London is a fine example of power projection - the statue is the same taken down to the individual or the event. At a time when people couldn't read or write, monuments were symbols of authority.
Now, when literacy is strong but historical knowledge isn't, statues and monuments become a physical link to a past of which so many are ignorant.
That's why those who fear the present and the future are so desperate to hold on to the physical representation of that nostalgia, when times were better and everything made sense.
Yet this is a wonderful time to be alive on most measures. People are healthier, living longer, living better and while there's more to be done, these are, if not the best of times, certainly not the worst.
The past is documented and can be read, explored, seen and to a degree experienced. The symbols of a bygone age should no longer have that resonance.
I wonder what else 2020 is going to offer us for entertainment. This is fucking brilliant. All we need now is life on Mars and the queen megging it for the full nap hand
The latter means 'deadpool' triumph for me, remember.
It shows how things have changed for the better. When DuraAce`s deadpool thingy was devised I suspect that we thought it would be settled quite quickly. Now we have the glorious outcome of "no winner" as being very possible. Seemed so unlikely. Or at least it did to me.
Yes, that is striking. A winner would be a surprise now.
And the atmosphere has changed. Panic over.
I would price a serious 2nd wave perhaps as high as 5 now.
Defenders of a Churchill statue making Nazi salutes. I’m starting to get the impression, just maybe, that they are not quite as clued up about history as they think.
England is full of absolute numpties, they only understand big headlines and pictures from the SUN, not even at the level of sheep. A rosy future beckons.
It has been the case through history that revolutionaries have been perpetually disappointed by the absence of radicalism amongst the working classes, and protests and revolutions have always been fuelled by what we would describe as middle class younger people, from 1968 back through the French and Russian revolutions. Indeed there is a theory that protest and social unrest tends to peak when there is an excess of supply of aspiring middle class youngsters compared to the number of relatively privileged opportunities that their society is able to offer.
Some even suggest that the slaughter and devastation of the English Wars of the Roses arose simply because the royalty of the time had children and grandchildren way in excess of the number of baronial positions available to them.
Consider the future prospects for younger graduates in the immediate post-COVID society and maybe there is a bigger picture.
Quite.
To paraphrase:
Number of graduates: 400,000, number of graduate jobs: 500,000, result: happiness Number of graduates: 400,000, number of graduate jobs: 100,000, result: misery
The higher education system was saddling a lot of young people with third rate degrees and huge debts, and then leaving them to get by on minimum wage crap jobs, *before* all of this kicked off. There'll be even fewer fulfilling careers available from now on.
In banking, one of the main achievements of "everyone must have a degree" has been cutting off entry for the less educated. So no more barrow boys working their way up.
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the working class and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
The last election showed there is very little support for Owen Jones or his politics in working class England.
Sadly not. Variety of reasons for that. Have often given my analysis of GE19 so will not do again here. But his book "Chavs" is imo very good. It shows great insight into, and affection for, the working class. Which he is of course.
Any case we all know who is really sneering at the working class. And there'll be hell to pay when they find out.
Yep the educated left Metropolitan set. They have always sneered at the working classes and their concerns. That is why they were so shocked when the working classes turned on them.
That was the last chapter. I'm talking about the next one.
I'm sensing a "far right and antifa - bad people on both sides" vibe taking hold on my favourite internet chat forum. Ah well. Free speech trumps my feelings, I suppose.
Speaking as someone you'd probably consider to be on the right, I'd say say that 100% of the far right were complete cnts and probably about 40-50% of antifa (leaving aside, for these purposes, the question whether the non-cnt balance of antifa are complete wankers).
hth.
Well I'm certainly agreeing on the 100%. Antifa being half as bad as the far right sounds a bit high to me. But I would need to mix with a bunch of them to verify that and I never have. Course, it depends on what your threshold is for cnut in the antifa context. Walker. Galloway. Wilkinson. This is my idea of a trio of cnuts on "our side" as it were. But Owen Jones, who I like and think has integrity and decent values, if he is a "cnut" in your eyes it means we probably have an irreconcilable definition delta.
I hate the Manichaeanism of the 21st Century perhaps more than any other aspect of this benighted time. Owen Jones’s Guardian pieces are terrible but “Chavs” is a genuinely important book. It is possible to be critical of individual pieces of work without condemning the whole person.
The growing tendency of the comfortable to sneer at the WWC and the great dangers if this continued.
"Chavs" was remarkably astute and prescient. I do not expect him to better it.
Particularly if you read it in conjunction with that Guardian piece about going to live among The Head Count. Sanders of The River was less sneering....
Sorry, not familiar. This is a piece by him sneering at the working class, is it?
No - I forget the ladies name - but it was a perfect example of what he was writing about.
You could almost *see* the pith helmet....
OK - I can well believe that. Maybe I'll look it up. Relieved it's not Owen. He really does not make a habit of sneering at the working class. Quite the opposite. He calls it out on the Left when it happens.
In Scotland we've now perfected the air shot defence. Huns, SDLers and Loyalists work themselves up to a red faced ferment, take a swing and there's nothing there. These lads might have to deface a few statues themselves to keep the righteous indignation going.
Are you surprised they didn't turn out, look at the typically shite Scottish weather.
London is lovely and sunny and hot
Wasn't last week. Are you saying lefty streetfighters have more fortitude than today's Der Stalhelm wannabes?
The one advantage of Scotland's truly dreadful climate, perhaps the worst in the world, is that you don't get large street demos and mass protests, because no one can be arsed to go out in the freezing mizzle
You mean the smirr. MIzzle is poncy Southronese. But I quite like this weather. No risk of sunburn to this gingery freckled chap!
Training up recent graduates in the company I work for, I am not sure what they are taught. It's not Marxism, but it's not really much of anything else either.
They are especially weak in critical thinking, English grammar and basic mathematics.
That's not to say they aren't talented. They are. They have merely been royally ripped off by the people who have taught them.
If someone had daubed "was a Liberal Unionist" on Churchill's statue, I would have condemned the act of vandalism but would have applauded the sentiment.
Whisper it quietly but we don't actually have a Conservative Government - the current Government is a Liberal Unionist Government calling itself Conservative.
I don't get this one-dimensional characterisation of people. Colston was involved in the slave trade but he was a philanthropist and gave generously to charitable causes. People are complex and contradictory and their motivations and aspirations change through their lives.
Churchill was a great war leader but he was an average politician in peace time. The Conservative Party, which now idolises him, loved him so much they tried to de-select him as an MP.
By some standards, I am a racist xenophobic bigot and it's just as well there are no statues of me anywhere.
The victors write the history and erect the statues - those who come later tear down the statues and re-write the history.
Indeed. Perhaps we should have no statues, to anybody!
Unless it’s me.
Most people like having their photo taken but very few would like a statue of themselves made. I got as far as having a painting of me in a mayoral chain. I might post it one day!
& if the remainiacs had accepted the decision given by the Electorate in June 2016, then all this angst might have been avoided. But they didn't, & so here we are. But make no mistake, any shit that's coming down the track will be on their account, not the people who voted to Leave the EU.
Comments
By all means take a prolonged and determined stand against racism in football, but is that really a wise strategy?
The problems always occur when well-meaning protest groups get highjacked by extremist groups with their own ideologies. It appears that the BLM groups have been ambivalent to more violent far-left groups joining their protest, which inevitably leads to opposition and much confrontation than would otherwise have been the case.
If I were in the position of a black community leader at the start of all this, I would have gone for thousands of people standing in silence, wearing masks and arranged in a grid 2m apart, over the largest space available. It would've been incredibly poignant.
You could almost *see* the pith helmet....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/28/the-lefts-diversity-problem/
“Yet the problem with the rising left is that it thinks working-class people in a highly diverse society will be able to put aside other allegiances such as race and gender to challenge a neoliberal economy that has, arguably, been pretty friendly to identity politics. There is simply no historical precedent for this kind of alliance, least of all in the New Deal, which Sanders holds up as his social-democratic model. The allegedly class-based politics of the New Deal era depended on social homogeneity and a manufacturing-based economy — neither of which exist today.“
In NI in the 1960s both the civil rights movement and the ascendancy types looked to the US for inspiration. (On Ian Paisley, see for example this.)
Whisper it quietly but we don't actually have a Conservative Government - the current Government is a Liberal Unionist Government calling itself Conservative.
I don't get this one-dimensional characterisation of people. Colston was involved in the slave trade but he was a philanthropist and gave generously to charitable causes. People are complex and contradictory and their motivations and aspirations change through their lives.
Churchill was a great war leader but he was an average politician in peace time. The Conservative Party, which now idolises him, loved him so much they tried to de-select him as an MP.
By some standards, I am a racist xenophobic bigot and it's just as well there are no statues of me anywhere.
The victors write the history and erect the statues - those who come later tear down the statues and re-write the history.
(Maybe she should ask her mother something about policing and how it works).
This is why it stands alone.
How fast things have changed, two weeks ago a symbol of anti-fascism, now he is to be cancelled.
Not sure that theory holds water.
To paraphrase:
Number of graduates: 400,000, number of graduate jobs: 500,000, result: happiness
Number of graduates: 400,000, number of graduate jobs: 100,000, result: misery
The higher education system was saddling a lot of young people with third rate degrees and huge debts, and then leaving them to get by on minimum wage crap jobs, *before* all of this kicked off. There'll be even fewer fulfilling careers available from now on.
The Tower of London is a fine example of power projection - the statue is the same taken down to the individual or the event. At a time when people couldn't read or write, monuments were symbols of authority.
Now, when literacy is strong but historical knowledge isn't, statues and monuments become a physical link to a past of which so many are ignorant.
That's why those who fear the present and the future are so desperate to hold on to the physical representation of that nostalgia, when times were better and everything made sense.
Yet this is a wonderful time to be alive on most measures. People are healthier, living longer, living better and while there's more to be done, these are, if not the best of times, certainly not the worst.
The past is documented and can be read, explored, seen and to a degree experienced. The symbols of a bygone age should no longer have that resonance.
And the atmosphere has changed. Panic over.
I would price a serious 2nd wave perhaps as high as 5 now.
Yup
In spades
& if the remainiacs had accepted the decision given by the Electorate in June 2016, then all this angst might have been avoided. But they didn't, & so here we are. But make no mistake, any shit that's coming down the track will be on their account, not the people who voted to Leave the EU.