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

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.

Robert Webb, his pal slightly annoys me.

Good grief indeed.

It's really kind of predictable at this point.

Alex comes in and says something kinda over the top and funny about something he finds irritating, because that's what Alex does to vent his frustration. And without fail, RM/RM turns up a bit later and instead of just rolling his eyes and going "Oh, it's Alex being typically over the top, but his irritation on this subject might have some justification" he insists on going on like it's his ~personal burden~ to school Alex in How To Behave Online.

And maybe I haven't learned when not to say something, and maybe I'm too loyal to people I consider friends (who often stick up for me). But apparently if I notice this pattern of behaviour, and instead of just quietly thinking "oh god it's just RM/RM beefing on Lex again" to myself, I say something: that's because I'm an inherently malevolent, evil person who also has a personal agenda against RM/Rm specifically - not because I'm sticking up for a friend, not because I understand the justification behind Alex's frustration and irritation, not because RM/RM started beefing again. It's because I'm a ~bad person~. Yup.

I could just say "Hey, you know what, let's just not do this again." But apparently, even if I say that, apparently that is ~me forbidding RM/RM to ever speak to him again~ rather than me admitting "this is a pointless and frustrating exercise for all of us, let's not go there."

I will regret it if I hit submit post; I will regret it if I don't hit submit post.

If I'm a ~bad person~ either way, I might as well do the thing.

Who knows which is worse? All those white men on the cover of New Statesman look alike to me.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg

isn't the idea of a poll like this to rile up white men by making them realize how much they hate being lumped in with other people who share only superficial traits with them and by so doing forcing them to acknowledge that it has been their luxury, as white men, to not have had this happen to them all along? that privilege has allowed them to have their multidimensionality remain unquestioned to a degree minorities could only dream of? if that was the idea, it's a good exercise, but you can't be surprised when people react as expected, by bristling at the possibility that they too could be subject to crude generalizations. i honestly can't help but be suspicious of white men who would feel totally cool about this and join in the chorus of people describing all members of the white male literary establishment as shits due to their white maleness. if you're into social justice you want to extend to privilege to not be objectified to everyone, not just strip it away from certain people, right? unless the latter is tactically important to the struggle... i tend to not think it is, but then again of course i would because i am a white male.

if this is just about venting about the ubiquity of male voices in a way that is cathartically unrestrained i get it and i would never resent someone for indulging in that kind of activity. but again, the fact that white males might pipe in to say "hey wait a second, this isn't fair!' is to be expected, if the thread concept is supposed to be unfair, rather for rhetorical or cathartic effect. right?

Treeship, I've got a great song for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPTXVqETBM4

Why would you deny the simple unadulterated joy of scientifically determining whether Tony Parsons is a greater cockfarmer than Martin Amis?

was waiting for this thread to get good

Basically the magazine we're talking about is not a very serious, and not a very successful, attempt to talk about the social issue of white men's dominance in the world - this thread seems like it's good for lots of stray observations, but not sure if it can support a proper discussion about the white men's dominance because we're all riffing off a fairly weak starting point, i.e. the special issue of a magazine.

For this reason I think you lot shouldn't all start falling out with each other in this thread.

ITT

Treeship, get some new fucking software you insufferable, smug boring prick.

the chorus of people describing all members of the white male literary establishment as shits due to their white maleness

where is this chorus because it isn't itt

guys this was a woeful clusterfuck in which nothing actually truly objectionable* was posited from sj cru nor the side of cool logical reason mansplainers and all was certainly well within limits of previous clusterfucks on same topic except maybe this one was p well justified by excellent trolling from new statesman (also lol new wasteman) so tip of cap to the cru but idk what the fuck the fuss on other threads was about this hasn't delivered. c+

*xelab doesnt count ffs

xelab isn't half the poster treesh is. he doesn't even reply to his own ask thread!

all excellent points

Relentless roffling at DJP's tune for Treesh tbf

fwiw my post wasnt intended to be some kind of defense of amis or james as human beings, just meant that was the extent of my limited contact w/ either—i was more curious what the story was as far as them sucking or w/e just bc i am not familiar