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

i am wondering who'd have to be amongst this lot to comprehensively, no-questions prevail. corden seems a shout, and yet

bush obv but not likely to be asked to weigh in on cutural issues in the uk now is he

alexei sayles my vote but i recognise that's not likely to fly on ilx

Rupert Murdoch?

rod liddle ftw

Hitler

Stephen Fry

What I know about them right now: Corden annoys people. Carey Mulligan's acting ability is in question and she dates a guy from a band that lots of people don't like.
Are they Ukip supporters too?

oh man fuck rod liddle

who would be on a US cover analogue? philip roth prob? franzen?

'corden annoys people, hitler had some dubious politics' you do realise this is the level of minimising yr guilty of there RAG

Wait I've got it: Morrissey

Hey now he's not well

heh

whichever little piece of fucking shit comes out of the Amis scrotom next = literary genius, get the fucking Gillster to interview him :O=

I still love Morrissey despite his often idiotic politics (including Ukip unfortunately), some other daft opinions, excessive negativity and his steep musical decline from the mid90s onward.

robert do you ever feel you have too much love for the rest of the world

;)

I need reasons to not commit suicide. Excessive negativity feels cheap, annoying and self destructive.

Amis seems like the type of writer I'd like to completely dismiss but I often hear good things. I was surprised that Caitlin R Kiernan was quite a fan.

But I confess I laughed my ass off at the Corden Hitler thing

Maaaaan, the sheer joy of hatred is the only thing that keeps me alive sometimes! (I mean that quite literally.)

:( sorry for assoff

without an ass u might have to shit thru ur scrotum like marty amis

marty aims v carefully

My hate list

Parsons
G G@lloway
Michae1 M00re
Putin
S Palin, Bush, McCain
Michael Howard

There are probably more but I prefer to keep the list short

can see you've had run-ins with Michael Moore before dude, good idea to googleproof him

Never had run ins with anybody or their fans. Just being cautious.

Simon Cowell too.

I was on a very anxious death-watch when I heard the tragic news of Marr nearly expiring on a rowing machine, I literally cried myself to sleep that night because I love him so much.

Marr isn't the worst writer of history i've ever read but otoh i wdn't bother reading another of his books

I used some of his audiobooks when I was stopping smoking, wouldn't be interested in reading any of his shit whereas I have Schama stuff like Citizens queued up.

I mean maybe it might be interesting but i really loathe the guy.

Poor writing? The only dirt I know was the injunction he made about a relationship or something.

Matthew Parris, like years and years ago he used to be a Conservative MP and, in the middle of one of those periodic hatestorms about people on benefits (yes we had them even before 'THE DEFICIT') agreed to try to live on benefits for a month (or something), for some telly programme. Parris (who, lest anyone forget is supposedly on the left of the Tory Scumbag Spectrum) lasted about less than a week and then ran out of money and had to be bailed out by the film crew, he admitted that he had found it impossible to live on benefits but that it did not change his fundamental belief that the amount of benefits paid to subhumans was still to far too high. Shortly afterwards he had the good grace to resign as an MP and begin to make a lot more money as a journalist and columnist and I AM GAY and if you ever read any of his I AM GAY columns you will realise I AM GAY onc Tory vermin always Tory vermin I AM GAY.

Though, obviously, there are worse people on the list... but take yr pick of right wing wankers (that includes Clive James btw).

unusual way to come out tom but grats

I hope I get as much mileage out of it Matthew Parris, that's all I can say

Maybe a lot of the other names I didn't recognise were people who have been on the Grumpy Old Men series

xp I'm not matthew parris tom but ok

On 6 September 2014 he wrote an article published in The Times under the heading "Tories should turn their backs on Clacton". [13] "This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain. So of course UKIP will do well in the by-election. My aim, though, is not to deny UKIP its likelihood of victory. They make a good fit for Clacton. Somebody has to represent the static caravans and holiday villages, and the people and places that for no fault of their own are not getting where a 21sth century Britain needs to be going. Nor do I deny that we Conservatives, if we tried hard enough, could get some of these voters back........ I'm not arguing that we should be careless of the needs of struggling people and places such as Clacton. But I am arguing - if I am honest - that we should be careless of their opinions."

I'm not saying that wouold have tempted me to vote UKIP but...

I have some time (despite disagreeing on many matters, obv) for Rowan Williams and Clive James, though I used to find the latter's TV shows rather irritating so maybe absence, heart, etc. I know v. little about Owen Jones apart from that youtube pasted on the politics thread, which was pretty otm. And I used to like Fry but find him bearable in inverse proportion to his Twitter/QI ubiquity and national icon status, which is to say not very much at all for the past several years.

Worst, I'm leaning towards Gill, but when I feel braver I shall investigate some of the other nominations and references on this thread and no doubt become very angry.

(oh I must track down that Amis video games book from the 80s, it seems like some hilarious proto-Nathan Barley business and Amis is ashamed of it = instantly a billion times more interesting to me than his other work)

Amis

The reason I was using search engines is to find out why on earth these people are so hated

That's the thing, googling might not explain it - the ones we hate, we have learned to hate over a long period of steady drip feeding, drip by drip, drop by drop. There's not some static thing we hate called Botton or Amis - Botton and Amis are processes, complex processes that are inflicted on us.

Pin the insect on the wall dead and it'll seem harmless because you can't hear the noise it makes with its wings, you know?

It's just a pity that whoever wins this will never know they won it.

You could send them a message, but they won't get it.

Would've been more funny if ilxors on the whole had been more wild in life. No reason why some of them might not have been on that cover.

Then the vote could hurt.

I'm trying to think of a good way to hurt Martin Amis, but this isn't it.

Some ilxor posters might yet someday be famous and hated. And I will be on a future poll saying whatever good things I can remember about them.

How about the people who aren't white men on that cover? How do you all feel about them?

Margaret Atwood is grebt

How do I feel about the people who aren't white men on the cover? Mostly just that there aren't anywhere near fucking enough, and don't get anywhere near enough billing (and presumably wordcount).

28 named contributors.

20 white men.

8 women.

2 (possibly 3 at a stretch, but conceptions of Iranian ethnicity can be complex, and I do not know how Amanpour identifies) people who aren't white.

What's fucking depressing is that just under 29% female is, compared to most lists, institutions, staffs of British newspapers, actually really quite progressive. But when you get to the point where you're saying "a bit less than a third is amazing compared to the usual one in ten!" it is just grinding.

I mean, you do understand why people are so irritated by this thing? That it's not just the specific list of those specific odious men (though cardamon OTM about the steady drip-drip-drip of their odiousness). It's about how that cover was released at first (without the list of White Men who were going to be in it, clearly attached to the outside so as not to startle the readership) as this Great! Work! Of Social Commentary! It's about how Grayson Perry's essay was being bandied about twitter and social media as this Important! Statement! On Equality! And Social Justice!

Then you see the list of people he's commissioned to write, and it's like... THIS is your great commentary on equality and justice. These people. This is your great progressive vision of a future not dominated by the absurd, elitist preponderance of straight, white, middle-class men. THIS. These 20 odious white men, and a couple of women, many of whom are already regular columnists for the magazine, so you probably had to take them anyway, right? Your talk means jack fucking shit if you don't put your money where your mouth is.

This isn 't "decrying witchcraft while selling your soul to the devil". This is "Being given a platform to talk about Witchcraft, Devil-Worship and Occultism are destroying today's society, and then opening up your rolodex and writing blank cheques to Anton LaVey, Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky"

It's a fucking joke! (And if it's *supposed* to work as "satire", an understanding which would require extending a huge benefit of the doubt which never normally gets extended to women or PoC, it doesn't really work, if the paycheques don't bounce.) Until I saw the contributors list, there was this tiny charitable impulse that thought "Well, I guess it's kind of noble that the straight, white man does actually use his platform to highlight inequality, even if he's doing so in the most unoriginal way, built on the labour of PoC and women who will never get that platform." But you see that contributor's list, that noble vision of his new society, the people who chooses to give the money and the platform to when he's making the decisions... SPARE ME.

I think it might be reasonable to assume it wasn't originally conceived as an issue about equality and justice, it was probably meant to be an issue about new masculinity / the future of white men, etc, and as a fig leaf to counter the perception that this is a tired, navel-gazing, exclusionary trope they got Perry on board to contribute a radical-seeming editorial and cover.

Voted Amis, should probably have voted Parsons. Gill at least seems to have some self-awareness about his own horribleness.

This isn 't "decrying witchcraft while selling your soul to the devil". This is "Being given a platform to talk about Witchcraft, Devil-Worship and Occultism are destroying today's society, and then opening up your rolodex and writing blank cheques to Anton LaVey, Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky"

awesome

It'd be awesome - if white privilege and male privilege weren't actual real society-destroying things, unlike witchcraft. But I know convincing people that they are real is hard sell, even on ILX.