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

Anything entitled "Mr Jones' Rules For The Modern Man" makes me want to smash things, and not in a sexual sense, either, just in a pulverise into tiny bloodsoaked little molecules until there is nothing left sense. :-(

& fwiw Ian Penman on Jones's new Elvis book - a couple of basically contemptuous paras about two-thirds of the way through:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n18/ian-penman/shapeshifter

Just curious - what are people's main beef with Owen Jones?

his valjean

or were people referring to dylan jones?

xp
to be absolutely clear all of my remarks refer to Dylan Jones – I like Owen Jones.

i have no problem with him other than his youth and success

Yeah, Owen Jones' only sins are to be a bit young, a bit hopeful and a bit idealistic. The Jones-baiting of the last few dozen posts is about Dylan Jones.

hmmm 'to be absolutely clear all of my remarks', i'm sounding v pompous there, think the list is infecting me.

ah good. i'm glad that got cleared up.

I voted for Alain de Botton but I've just discovered who Dylan Jones is and I'd like to change it.

One good thing at least is Toby Young must be fuming he never got asked to contribute.

Also Rod Liddle also Richard Dawkins.

Kind of curious though what Dawkins would have said.

Liddle was the other most glaring omission.

maybe something like Tony Parsons contribution to 'The Manifesto'?

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/10/manifesto-new-man-how-great-white-male-can-stay-relevant

What has the Great White Male ever done for us? Shakespeare and Dickens. Picasso and Matisse. Morrissey and Marr. Jagger and Richards. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the inventors of the new century. The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy. The warriors who protected us, the fathers who held us. Hemingway and Fitzgerald. John F Kennedy and John Cooper Clarke. Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas.

White men, eh? What a waste of space!

I am not convinced that the Great White Male desperately needs a new male manifesto – the past thousand years have gone quite well for us without one. Here’s to the next thousand years, man!

you've got to be shitting me

fuck i should have voted parsons

you weren't shitting at all ;_;

Wow.

I mean, I typed out some more ~offensive~ responses like "go die in a fire" and "choke on your own vomit" or "go fuck yourself with a running chainsaw, Tony fucking Parsons" but realised that my rage is pretty impotent and the only real response possible is just "wow".

can't believe he missed paul weller and bobby moore ;_;

Here’s to the next thousand years, man!

The URL. How the Great White Male can stay relevant. Because this is the problem. The Great White Male is losing his relevance. This shit is beyond satire. I can't even get up bile or rage for this.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web.

The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and the nazis who bravely tried to fight them back

It's not his fault. He was married to Julie Burchill, you know. And living forever in the shadow of his more famous spouse, he is condemned to live like a woman for the rest of his days. How it must shrink his penis to contemplate it.

This is the position taken by most of these ghastly exercises - how can the white man adapt, how can we achieve social justice by modifying the white man's behaviour, how can white men become better white men, etc. The idea of taking a step back and letting others set their own agenda, have their own say, barely occurs.

How can the Great White Man keep the stranglehold of attention forever on the Great White Man. How. Let us debate it for the next two thousand years!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LrdLC5OXyGg/TeKhp0mTcnI/AAAAAAAAAug/J1R5-6i7ENM/s1600/Whiteman.jpg

Most dicks are smaller dicks than Julie Burchill it's true

The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy. The warriors who protected us, the fathers who held us.

Never change, Tone. War, boxing, real men, East End, dear old dad, heroes, blah-di-blah.

Sadly in the real world he is in no way in Julie B's shadow. He's the one with the inexplicably bestselling novels and the inexplicably popular newspaper column.

shit, his new one (a thriller. With heart) seems to be doing ok - he'd been in sales decline since Man and Boy, was hoping he'd just sort of melt away

into a small sour puddle of piss

Now Tony Parsons v Julie Burchill would be some kind of awfulness deathmatch like the negative inverse of Daddy v Chips but I don't think I could handle the sucking chestwound of odiousness that would be caused by TWO polls featuring Parsons in SNA.

i missed this two days ago but it is a beautiful thread, apart from the minor save-a-white-man nonsense that only ever shows itself in threads about white men (really, when was the last time you saw someone be all WELL ACTUALLY THEY HAVE SOME GOOD POINTS THEY SEEM LIKE A NICE PERSON! about a woman or non-white person accused of being awful)

objectively someone like aa gill or tony parsons probably is the worst but acknowledging it almost feels like giving in to a relentlessly played and very deliberate shtick that's already got them way too far in life; i feel like dylan jones or stephen fry or alain d'arse still need to be told what unutterably dull cunts they are, gill or parsons would both be like "yup i know" and count their cash.

i missed all the twitter ethering but SURELY this must have had an element of satire about it? completely fucking uselessly played by the new statesman

yeah i assumed from the cover it was supposed to be satire but from the parsons bit, it's clear someone's got the wrong end of the stick.

If everyone on the cover was polled I would have defended Bonnie Greer (she's the most familiar to me of the women), Mary Beard and Margaret Atwood.

when was the last time you saw someone be all WELL ACTUALLY THEY HAVE SOME GOOD POINTS THEY SEEM LIKE A NICE PERSON! about a woman or non-white person accused of being awful

Oh come on, nobody's defending the people who have been specifically accused of being awful: Gill, Parsons, etc. It's just been pointed out that some of the people in this poll don't appear to be awful, eg, I can't work out what Clive James's great sin is meant to be. God forbid we should consider people in the round instead of branding them as unforgivable shits for all time on the basis of an ILX poll. You're better than this Lex. I hope.

Argh. The wilful level of misunderstanding.

Not wilful. I'm prepared to accept dim.

Who gets "the benefit of the doubt". Who gets the pleas to be "considered in the round". Who gets the ~wiggle room~.

Great White Men.

Certainly not Lex, or me, or people who aren't Straight White Men. No, we get the patronising little "you're better than this" and the accusations of "beefing" if we dare to be anything less than 100% positive of the actions of the great white, straight white men.

The point, you are proving it.

I like Margaret Atwood

i'm inclined to say that James became a willfully pompous bore but there is a strain of that even in his early TV criticism. that said, he is also capable of self-reflection and genuine affinity for popular culture and he's nowhere the front rank of uselessness in this list

yeah clive james rap sheet = mocking foreign tv (by extension foreigners? it's been a long time), air of smugness/pomposity, bit of lech/crepe sometimes, drifted into being a conservative cultural critic. pretty minor league in this company.

I suspect that the New Statesman has trolled their contributors by not giving them a good steer on what was needed (ensuring some pretty random and trivial responses) - and then trolled their readership by printing them.

xp Yeah that must be what it is. You caught me red-handed. Perceptive as ever.

Good grief.

Was rereading first two volumes of Clive James' memoirs over the summer and was pleased to discover how rich and luminous they remain - the one about his youth in Australia like stories told from another planet, just glowing with how different the world of his youth was from the world he know existed within, the second volume conjuring an almost physical sense of how grotty and damp and sepia-toned pre-Beatles Britain was, both volumes full of hilarious tales well told, and characterised by an impressive and moving sense of regret at how much of a fool he'd been when young, how much of a fool he doubtless remains. was also very much moved by his recent poem about the plant at his daughter's house, the one about death. as mentioned above, i think some of his TV shows could be smug and condescending in places, but I also think he's quite insightful elsewhere, about other things, and also very droll - perhaps that's just his writers, but...

everyone else is terrible, I guess, though I don't really get what Robert Webb's done that's so very wrong, tbh, though I only really know him from Peep Show.

I just put every dude on the poll for the sake of completeness, some of these people are basically fine and deserving of better company than this.

Yeah, that's what I figured, Matt - was more referring to the hate he's stirred in this thread, and was genuinely curious how he'd gotten so many goats so much.