spiked - the independent online phenomenon

Interesting piece on Curtis - fair bit to absorb! I'm not super familiar with Curtis as I've found his stuff irritating, and difficult to watch. I feel like Curtis was one of the first to make Putin into this all-powerful figure? that now seems default for mainstream media, particularly since 2016)

Going back to the spiked people, I'm getting a sense of Trotskyist/Communist left in the 60s/70s the viewed itself like those Soviet posters, as strong men that were going to do great things, storm factories and other fantasies. And that by the late 1980s that was losing the battle with reality. And that the feminists and the environmentalists were a sign of weakness and how are we going to storm the factories with these losers in our midst, wanting to make sure we don't stand on a daffodil on the way to the factory?

And the wish their ranks were made up of miners and not souped up horticulturalists. And somewhere along the line a fetishising of the miners and growing intolerance and hatred for those perceived as weak, and who hadn't performed or been up to scratch?

Which then ties in with the Great Man stuff. A fetish for strength and power that needed a new vehicle once the illusion the old vehicle was going to work finally died

All grift aside, this feels a pretty organic process

Sorry on incoherence, kind of thinking aloud

Does Furedi's 'career' essentially foreshadow Jordan Peterson's or is that too facile (and pointless) a comparison?

feel religion plays a significant part in peterson’s schtick? not really applicable here.

the RCP calling their magazine "living marxism" precisely bcz they had declared that exactly what avil describes, that kind of marxism-as-factory-centred-workerism, was DEAD marxism (bcz the working class was now passive and co-opted and so the proletariat were no longer available as a vanguard: the future would be about intellectuals! and technology!

(this general worry abt the co-opted passivity of the WC was widespread in the 4th international in the 70s: the SWP made a big deal of the "great downturn" and very much turned to recruiting among students and teachers, with much less union activism -- which became a self-fulfilling prophecy)

xp I guess I was more thinking about how the academy becomes like a benign shelter and a legitimising force for all the truth claims these schmucks are wont to make.

here are the times i've talked abt cyberia on other threads lol:

they're a mid-70s offshoot of IS (which underwent many splits at that time: what was left evolved into the swp): the revolutionary communist party then split from the revolutionary communist group* over tactics relating to anti-apartheid (ribald voice from the back: "yes, furedi was pro! etc etc haw haw") -- its organ "living marxism" (so-called bcz everyone else's was declared dead) was active until the mid-90s, when a journalist they libelled during the yugoslav civil war sued it to extinction. they were rebooting at this time as radical libtertarian cyberlefties anyway -- they ran and made a lot of cash from the early internet cafe cyberia -- and (presumably cynically) adapted to harmonise with the tech flavour of libertarianism instead. even in the early 90s the other trot orgs mocked them as a yuppie party

*according to wikipedia, the RCG's paper fight racism! fight imperialism! is still running for nearly 40 years, tho it's a LOOOOONG time since i've seen a copy on sale. rumours that Spiked! is abt to be renamed don't fight racism! don't fight imperialism! are too funny to ignore

― mark s, Friday, December 7, 2018 4:34 PM (ten months ago) bookmarkflaglink

living m's USP in the 80s -- hence the name -- was that all the other available micro- and macro-flavours of marxism were getting everything wrong (hence were "dead m") and important updates were needed in light the shape of the modern world and where science was taking us

i: they made a good gamble on technology -- cyberia was them, and i ran into several lower echelon minions in media tech positions in the 90s, where they were often p good at what they did
ii: they made a good gamble on contrarian columnism in reactionary papers (m!ck hume at the times was the brendon o'n of the 90s)
iii: they seriously fucked up during the yugoslav civil war and LM was sued out of existence by journalists they told lies about
iv: they are well organised and long-game enough to have done well in the (declining, decadent) space of legacy media, by its deeply fuck awful (bcz so easily gameable) standards, but have not yet found a good face for the TV screen and they're so-so at best on social media, quite easily dunkable etc
v: i don't know if he always was but i think their chief guru is now literally just a fascist (he's another orban-fancier)…
vi: … and the many younger minions more or less a cloud of biddable idiots working out his plan, wittingly or unwittingly

― mark s, Wednesday, November 7, 2018 12:38 PM (eleven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

doublechecked wikipedia to see if the RCP actually ever identified as trots -- often an issue in flyspeck sectarian uk groupuscules -- and the answer is apparently YES tho i think they were nonetheless not echt fourth-internationalists despite a thread of connection (unexplored in WP) to the IS: their argt was that the living line of revolutionary marxism had broken and would need to be re-established

anyway what actually caught my eye was that they drew up a document in 1983 called PREPARING FOR POWER so you can't say they weren't optimistic

(their chief source of presence is probably that they were REALLY early in on the internet, running a v successful internet cafe called CYBERIA and putting themsevves around as advisors on e.g. magazine wanting to turn digital -- i worked with a little clutch of them in the mid-late 90s and tbh, terrible politics aside, learnt quite a lot abt computer publishing from them)

― mark s, Monday, August 6, 2018 6:24 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

the journalist who "sued living marxism to extinction" was ed vulliamy, recently spotted commenting sourly on the handke nobel

I wonder if the likes of Fred look at BernieBros in this way

I don't get the comparison.

My RW cousin has said he basically agrees with Spiked on every issue, and "it is good that there are reasonable people on the left". So thats one part of their audience

It did make me think about the role of Conspiracies. My cousin will usually caveat most things with saying "I dont think theres a conspiracy", and it struck me that the Spiked world is generally pretty anti-Conspiracy Theory? Except presumably for something like "Greta Thunberg is being manipulated by people who want working class people to have their cars confiscated"). Its quite a prosaic view of the world, and cospiracies are sort of mystical and probably bourgeois, like yoga, hippies, and Marks and Spencers - and therefore to be treated with caution and disdain

their pov is so cynical and inconsistent that they have no need for a conspiracy

Lol I mean the Koch brothers astro turf empire is a major and well known "conspiracy" that they are small but active players in. Also they all seem really unchill and annoying to spend any time with.

Seems as much to do with a lack of imagination, a dislike of anything thats complex. A variant on the "get it done, how hard can it be?" school. Proper tunes

Claire Fox having all sorts of problems with the Weinstein verdict. Why are these vile people given any platform at all?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n13/jenny-turner/who-are-they

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-antifada/ep-93-how-trotsky-got-spked-JUqkKSPrzMe/#episode

Couple of bits on all this here

meanwhile on the front page of spiked:

‘There’s no direct evidence that the lockdowns are working’
Dr John A Lee on why we need to keep questioning the response to Covid-19.

how helpful !

Very interesting article, good to see it slightly more from the inside than usual, but think she could have done a bit more to mention the other tendrils the LM network has wrapped around the media in the UK. Particularly liked the ending, it's true that they are not an independent cancer in society, but tie into the immensely-arrogant, over-reliant-on-rationality thread which runs through most of the media in the UK, the "let's talk like grown-ups" thing is a good tell, and it is indeed the mark of intellectual growth which has been stunted by lack of empathy (and, again, arrogance.)

If possible they're on TV even more than usual at the moment, Claire Fox certainly is.

jenny turner piece nearly a decade old now!!

sorry that's just a content-free "time flies when everything is fucked" type post

I haven't read the article yet, the podcast came up semi-randomly and ended up listening to it on my run this morning. I then noticed the article linked from the podcast, will most likely read next week

xp oh wow didn't even notice it was a piece from 10 years ago!

Free speech for some, massive pasty foreheads for others, culture war for everyone!

Seems like the epidemic is spreading! pic.twitter.com/DsJfjiBAgW

— Huw Lemmey (@huwlemmey) June 3, 2020

I think it is terrible that poor Brenda is getting shamed for his hilariously massive forehead!

Lol autocorrect brenda

sorry for self-posting but it really is too easy

Hi @spikedonline Brendan O'Neill has a grotesquely distended forehead and also has bad opinions, do not block me as this is a free speech issue

— Neil Stewart (@neilstewart) June 3, 2020

A sad day for free speech on the web pic.twitter.com/qZBLrKRn2h

— Neil Stewart (@neilstewart) June 3, 2020

lol

silenced4truth

I specifically told them NOT to block me, because free speech, and now look what has happened

Now you could say there are quite a lot of people living in his grotesquely distended forehead, rent free.

*muffled screams* pic.twitter.com/6gzVvc3t2F

— Guybrush Tweetgood (@Gordopolitz) June 3, 2020

now that's just taking things too far

*eyes bleeding*

Kenneth Cranham in Hellraiser 2 dot gif (was gonna post it, thought better of it)

https://t.co/AFYhEoLkI4 pic.twitter.com/1Ff1WAmbIA

— John Duncan (@Johntheduncan) June 7, 2020

brendan o’neill but with each post his forehead gets bigger: a thread pic.twitter.com/09wGN47N0U

— jonathan nunn (@demarionunn) June 9, 2020

LOLz even though I kind of hate that this arse is famous enough to have the pish ripped out of him online.

I want to see him getting shamed about his appearance so hard that he is reduced to wearing a ridiculous bowler hat or a mark knopfler head band on the BBC or sky news!

Head band? He'd need a cummerbund.

hated and derided likeness of one of history's greatest monsters being dredged up from the bottom of Bristol harbour

off to museum with you pic.twitter.com/nUev2dt9ND

— Guybrush Tweetgood (@Gordopolitz) June 11, 2020

if i write a thinkpiece demanding people stop forehead-shaming Brendan are Spiked gonna have to run a bit about why forehead-shaming is good?

By Trying to Ban the Forehead-Shaming of Brendan O'Neill, the "Tolerant" Left are Showing their True Colours

- by Brendan O'Neill

subs, please check

pic.twitter.com/GNju7K8C3C

— Nooruddean (@BeardedGenius) June 15, 2020

thought you would be posting this, which is less funny

Boris Johnson has asked Munira Mirza to set up his commission on racial inequality. Here's some of her former work. pic.twitter.com/yOY40Cntjb

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) June 15, 2020

How about setting up Gary Glitter to head a commission on child abuse next!

Look. Criticise Furedi, Revolutionary Communist Party/Living Marxism, Institute of Ideas, Spiked Online, Academics For Academic Freedom, Academy of Ideas, Ad-Hoc Hands Off the Middle East Committee, Africa Direct, Audacity, Battle of Ideas, Belfast Salon, Big Potatoes, BioNews >

— Andy Fleming (@slackbastard) June 16, 2020

Extraordinary thread on how many cut-outs they have.

Spiked… idk, I'm always surprised it's still going - still chugging along, still pretending to be quite serious, still publishing 3rd rate cultural crit + ooh-contrary LM challops by men in glasses; no-one ever notices, though, from what I can see - maybe I move in the wrong bit of the internet, but no-one seems to give 1 sol. shit about them. What an odd place.

― you don't exist in the database (woof), Friday, 27 January 2012 13:43 (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

flashback to a more innocent age

Suggest calz gets himself down to the Huddersfield Salon and reports back.

"Families for Freedom, Families Need Freedom"

when PIE amalgamated with some anti-vax organisations!