Worst white man on the cover of the New Statesman's 'Great White Male' issue

An entire agricultural convention's worth of cockfarmers here.

http://media.tumblr.com/7975c8747ad941f9bfb10a135efa4933/tumblr_inline_mhibl5Sqyi1qz4rgp.gif

The field is strong. That the likes of Melvyn Bragg and Dylan Jones can't even break the top five...

as i said, my suspicion is baddiel, but persuade me

o wait there's tony parsons

That is horrific, the News of the World was shut down for less. Can I immigrate now?

Actually Jones might just sneak in at 5. But the champions league places are Amis, Parsons, de Botton, Gill. Not necessarily in that order.

I don't know who Tom Shone or Damien Barr are tbh. I confess to hating Jon Snow with every fibre of my breakfast.

Who's the best btw? Owen vs Rowan maybe. You'll all say Will Self :P

not saying that Baddiel isn't awful but in terms of this list I don't see what makes him worse than distinctly middling.

Oh no no, NO-ONE would say Will Self surely?!?!??!

(xp)

Bragg, Jones, Baddiel duking it out for a Europa league place- but how much do they actually want the resulting fixture pile up the following season?

Baddiel is the worst sort of snivelling 'liberal' apologist for ladbantz bollocks /xelab

Can never forgive Bragg for that piece on becoming a lifelong Arsenal fan at the age 40

Clive James has done great to finish top half here, but lacks the squad depth to really kick on.

... or forgive Arsenal either

I don't know to what extent it's fair to hate Stephen Fry for what he represents but fairness isn't really what this kind of poll is about is it

Parsons wrote the dumbest trolly 'advice' for the issue - basically 'history shows we're awesome so whatever' (NB not read the Amis bit).

lol @ actually reading this bog roll

Surprised at tony parsons xp

C'mon big tone you're better than this

He is?

No

Tom Shone's a great film critic fwiw. His book Blockbuster is brilliant.

Not the biggest Baddiel fan but "snivelling 'liberal' apologist for ladbantz bollocks" was his schtick 20 years ago, not now.

Toss-up between Parsons and Gill - both equally loathsome in different ways.

Parsons, even before the Ukip stuff. There's quite a lot of people I don't know on the list but I can't imagine anyone being worse (among these sort of guys).

existence of andrew marr's history of the world bothers me

want to vote de botton I think

Parsons is right in the sweet spot of dickishness, reprehensible politics and cultural worthlessness, some of the others have at least a sliver of a redeeming feature somewhere, although Matthew Parris is getting off pretty easy so far.

I know next to nothing about Alain de Botton and I'm not about to start changing that now.

alain de botton iirc is a ted talk personified

don't know if i can be arsed to run thru all these but i have a plentiful bile tank on standby at all times for Robert Webb, Alain de Botton and Tony Parsons. there are others equally deserving i'm sure.

can't think of any Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation who hasn't been some shade of cunt

rowan came so close to being rly good

but then fucked it up

What's wrong with Robert Webb? Are there two famous people with that name(or many more), just like David Mitchell?

just find Webb & Mitchell unfunny and smug to a degree beyond most of their smug unfunny peers i guess

Rowan Williams was about as good as A of C's get, which might not be saying much, also a big Incredible String Band fan

he's not in my top rank of worstness here by any means, just saying it's a well dodgy institution

Stephen Fry is just the worst.

How so?

I can't chose between Gill and Parsons, but i suspect they are the same person.
I can recall reading Gill in the ST Culture section, circa 90's after a female supermarket worker made a saucy comment about his daughters' name and his rebuttal was at least she won't end up working in a fucking supermarket. I stopped hate-reading him in the mid 90's but he left an indelible impression, especially when he was bragging about his young model girlfriend and relating how comfortable he was being a dirty old man.
Parsons for his laughable, self piteous lone dad shite and that execrable "hateful desert" 9/11 piece he wrote, all his shitty books and for constantly being the most off the money, hectoring cunt on the late show.

yeah I was split between the chimp parsons and gill the goon who shot a baboon

The sheer amount of odiousness on display is just staggering. I mean, really... ANY OF THESE just for starters

Martin Amis
Robert Webb
Stephen Fry
Tony Parsons
Alain de Botton
AA Gill

But I'm kind of circling in on Amis and Gill as the most deeply odious for me personally but it is truly a deep pit of hell (even though I can scrape up tiny modicums of 'well he's not thaaaaaat bad by comparison with the rest of the list' for Owen Jones and Rowan Williams but although I did enjoy a Will Self novel or four, somehow being in this company makes him more odious than I'd normally find him... funny how the mass of them together increases their sheer vileness.)

I don't know much about Amis, don't know anything about Botton, but what have Amis, Botton, Webb and Fry done to deserve being placed next to Parsons and Gill?

You could, maybe, I dunno... google them and find out?

Amis

Let's all interview this cunt and treat him like some demi-god because he just had another appalling novel published and had some very fucking expensive dental work :O=

Martin Amis and his... ~feeling about Muslims~ let him explain them to U. Stephen Fry and his "I'm gay, how am I supposed to know anything at all about what women feel about sex (but let me shoot my mouth off about it, repeatedly, in really gross misogynistic ways, tee hee, I'm so naughty)" or Alain de Botton and "let me condescend to you, badly, about architecture and morality and ~my feelings about porn~ and how the Pain of Being Bald gives me an insight into the suffering of the marginalised" and ugh Webb and just general smug punchability and gross ugh yuck.

I mean, if you wanted to get in a good point about unearned, inherited privilege and how only two dozen families control Britain politically and culturally and will do for the rest of our sodding miserable lives then "Amis" was a pretty good name to pick to get the point across.

I searched them and added the word "controversy" and some of that stuff did come up. Also something about Fry and Poland.

I had been aware of Amis having an English middlebrow king snob reputation.

Webb never came across anymore smug to me than the general bunch of Have I Got News For You regulars, which can be pretty bad but rarely odious enough to get close to Parsons. I thought he seems nice.

thing is i've not thought about 90% of these tosspots in a zillion years. actually thought that clive james was dead tbh

tragically, everybody on this list has their fans.

Clive James cheated on his wife. On a quick search I couldn't find anyone else.

Rijksmuseum with the fucking post-its has really been gnawing away at me.

Sorry you had to see that. I'd love to go to Rijksmuseum someday but they have to take that crap off first.

i only really have attack/defend contrariness with James and maybe Amis… for me it's mostly to do with being an English books person, they've always been there for the 25 years of my proper reading life so the ledger is very very long (but as per upthread, that permapresence is a symptom of GWM culture).

But w/ Amis, I'm way less inclined to try to defend, partly because there's always enough of a crowd sticking up for Money, & partly bcz well take the interview with Perry from the issue:

GP How do you think we can tease out the cultural and political and gender influence of Default Man? Because he is a minority.

MA Well, I don’t think he should be persecuted on that account.

GP He certainly punches well above his weight, demographically, because historically he’s been given all the opportunities.

MA I think he’s heading for a time of comparative wilderness, don’t you? It’s a great disadvantage to be Default Man now.

GP Do you really think it is?

MA It’s getting to be.

GP But he is still Default and, because he is Default, he has power.

MA Christopher Hitchens’s son, Alexander, who’s making a name for himself as a journalist, has as his byline Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens – Meleagrou is his mother’s maiden name. And I thought that was brilliant. “Alexander Hitchens” is defaultish, right? His national identity is a sort of albatross. I always wished I had something exotic about me, because everyone favours that now.

GP It’d be a fun gentleman’s club game to rally round stories of the persecution of Great White Males – but it doesn’t look like that from the outside. It looks like they still have a monopoly on power.

MA On power, yes, but in art, no.

GP Well, within my business, visual art, the intake is 75 per cent female and yet you look at who has showed their work and I think there still is a dominance of males.

etc i mean there's plenty more in there too.

Christ.

there's worse, but when he gets to "that’s Beckett skewered for ever" I just can't

So are you going to tell me a 'meditation on death' doesn't sound pretentious already?

why would that be pretentious? death is something we all have to deal with.

besides mine was better tbh

I don't think it's the "death" bit that's pretentious here, treesh.

problem is death's been approached innumerable times before (because it's both mundane and unique), by many people - you're going to need to bring some chops to justify that title to avoid bathos.

it can make what comes look vapid, as I think this poem is - dull lines, mawkish truisms or just truisms. he wrote one about fading mental capacity and no longer being the centre of attention, which is better I think, tho his line never exactly sings.

Yes its the 'meditation' that I picked on. Bit allergic to anything deacribed as such.

i find the james poem pretty staid in its sentimentality. i don't think a ponderous tone equals meaningfulness.

in terms of recent works by minor white male poets looking at death, I liked Hugo Williams' Dialysis poems more.

i thought its strength was its willingness to risk cliche for the purpose of honesty. i have some personal associations with the imagery too. it's not the kind of poem designed to blow people away but it feels true.

...

ach, fine, it's your aesthetic i guess

now a thread in which ilmers review a pome

it's what clive james would have wanted

i met clive davis back in may. i didn't know it was him at the time.

i sat and watched some Cardinal Burns last night, too tired to go to bed, and now i hate Robert Webb just a shade less

Clive Davis vs Clive James

Arista had an awesome logo

James/Davis/Dunn/Tyldesley/of India poll needed

Dunn, obvs

Anderson/Sinclair/Owen/Stafford Smith

Still Dunn.

sounds like a dunn deal

http://www.cbgxtra.com/blogs/beautiful-balloons/clive-by-mcgill-and-poelsma

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/michael-hofmann/splashing-through-the-puddles

Its a bumper issue of Great White maleness: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/owen-hatherley/who-will-stop-them

Been watching lots of Simon Munnery recently and this is one of many I liked..

"If a million monkeys were given a million typewriters, eventually one of them might produce the complete works of Shakespeare but to reach it would it be worth wading through four hundred copies of "Money" by Martin Amis?"

man that review of the new amis is really brutal. loled tho cuz i read time's arrow and the gulag one but i had no idea he'd written another fastidious little novel set pompously against the midnight of the century. cmon man.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

brilliant results tbh

Parsons was robbed.

Dylan Jones suffering bigtime from FPTP voting system.

i tried to read the grayson perry lead article (in fairness, i should probably get past the first few 100 words before commenting) but his glee seemed more about the act than the actual message. i.e. i wasnt entirely sure he actually believed what he was trying to say or if he just liked the apparent 'naughtiness' (i was going to say radicalness but naughtiness/outrageousness seems to fit the tone better). but then i just thought that if a white male hadnt written this piece, no one at the NS would probably have cared that much.

AA Gill on the politics of the suit are you fucking kidding me

@georgegalloway
Don't miss my show tonight on @talkRADIO with John Pilger Peter Hitchens Peter Oborne and Julian Assange. 7pm. Mother of all Talkshows.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAei7reXMAkf3NY?format=jpg&name=900x900

couldn't this shit make it up

he's just thinking bout how he could make the planet earth bald

I mean, I guess Webb is kind of a lightweight when compared to the full on tossitude of Parsons and Amis and Gill and Botton and Fry. But give him 20, 30 years and I'm sure he'll get there.

― Jacques Lacan let me rock u; let me rock u, Jacques Lacan (Branwell with an N), Saturday, 11 October 2014 21:52 (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

beat the spread by a good 15 years

Only ONE vote for Matthew Parris, ILX I am not angry with you, just very disappointed.

anyway this is a great nostalgia trip back to a long bygone age where these threads would attract a host of disingenuous "what's wrong with Scumbag X?" posts

"He's got the whole world, in his hands.. he's got the whole world.. in his hands.."

"Not the biggest Baddiel fan but "snivelling 'liberal' apologist for ladbantz bollocks" was his schtick 20 years ago, not now."

yes he's somehow been even almost worse than he was then, but he did stop doing blackface tbf

I'm amused that I didn't even know who Matthew Parris was at the time of this poll. Happier days of ignorant bliss! Bragg is a wanker but I still consider In Our Time a decent program and I guarantee whichever cunt replaces him when he succumbs to dementia will be a thousand times worse than him.

Was gonna say, Webb and Baddiel would have gotten way more votes this time 'round.

And Alain de Botton way less.

Did everyone forget who Will Self was?

45 years ago today (4 November 1977), the New Statesman published this article about divisions in the Communist Party of Great Britain. It is the first written use that I have found of the term ‘tankie’ to describe someone who (uncritically) supported the Soviet Union. pic.twitter.com/plCY3gk9Ge

— Evan Smith (@evansmithhist) November 4, 2022

This is a very … peculiar framing, but I do wonder where all the Statesman’s sugar daddy money has gone. The magazine’s professional irritants (and Will Lloyd, who commissions the worst of them) can’t be that expensive to run. pic.twitter.com/gLn4cK157g

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) November 18, 2023