one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

You sure? He sounds much like himself on The Panel but a bit older/croaky. He does look more like Haughey now too lol

Mason has been awful for the last couple of years.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, November 6, 2018 3:32 PM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if only stoya had gone to athens

Listening to this I assumed his "peasant stock" ancestors migrated to England in the 1820s. His parents left Ireland in *1968* almost a century after the Land War. Interesting to hear him talk about Connaught and its people like a bitter absentee landlord though. https://t.co/IOLvyGdeeu

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) November 5, 2018

maybe hes just hungover. lol at haughey tho

listen, tbfttptc in that clip, Stephen mangan went on a "who do you think you are" style walk across ballycroy to belmullet with cameras a year or three back and stopped at a fifties cowshed (and a badly kept one) and wistfully said "to think my mother was raised in a bothy very much like this" and i just couldn't believe he was such a gullible mug so maybe its a thing where irish expat mammies just bullshit their posh sons idk

A senior EU official tells @rtenews tonight there will be "no breakthrough" on the backstop this week. This is not just because the UK cabinet is divided over whether there should be a NI-specific backstop as a final safety net, or because of the termination clause...

— Tony Connelly (@tconnellyRTE) November 5, 2018

tony a straight bat on brexit for rte i think

i mean...this backstop agreement is just another shell of "can we not and say we did" but im presuming its being sold as otherwise on yere side?

I don't really get the impression that anyone's bothering to sell anything on this side TBH, it's not like there's a raging public debate about any of it more nuanced than "BREXIT BAD STOP IT NEW VOTE" vs "REMOANER ELITES DISREGARDING THE SEVENTEEN MILLION".

SEVENTEEN POINT FOUR, TIM

I was wondering if Maxwell was ah pre-hungover in that clip.

i for one refuse to believe that Brendan would just bare-faced lie on national TV

lying on tv is illegal iirc

turns out getting Popeye Scruton in as "Housing Tsar" might not have been the best idea:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/theresa-may-calls-sack-housing-adviser-islamophobia

had a feeling this appointment was going to be another Toby Young. Cue some Spiked piece about how a twat can't even get a job these days.

scruton is much more sinister than young tbh: he can write, he's not at all a fool, he has accomplishments and deployable knowledge

on the other hand the pet shop boys successfully sued him for a big stupid fib in his book abt music so lol, i hope he always falls down on hills and rolls into gorse or poo

scruton with the classic ‘saying the quiet part loud’ firing, 7.5/10

what he passes off as "honeyed classicism" might impress some people, but he's a fucking idiot imo!

Scruton faced the demands to quit after BuzzFeed News uncovered a series of comments he had made in previous articles, books, and a BBC radio programme.

I don't think he's clever at all, he just speaks authoritatively sounding and in the right accent and people lap it up, but his opinions are just retrograde tosh, even before you start criticising the constant racism.

I can imagine Brendan O'Neill's "the REAL sinister forces at work are those seeking to de-platform Scruton" thinkpiece already

“Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros empire,” Scruton wrote in a lecture entitled The Need for Nations, which is reproduced in Hungarian and English on his website.

Strikes me that Buzzfeed isn't giving this comment the attention is merits, it's route-one antisemitism.

scruton's books aren't mockable dinesh d'souza-type stuff, they're defences of reactionary positions in everything from art to philosophy to politics that are scholarly enough to need work and thought to argue against within the world of scholars (except when he steps out of his comfort zone and trashes 80s synth pop)* -- but yes, i don't think he's a smart talking head especially**

*e.g. if someone said "i want to find out about kant, should i read this introduction to him by roger scruton?" i'd say, "yes, if you read through an ideological filter (and no money gets back to the author)" rather than "lol no it's pure garbage" -- his USP heavy academic underpinning
**we actually live in a world where dinesh d'souza types probably get much more traction so sucks to scruton for taking a path that cost him effort w/o the payoff he yearns for

yes the orban-soros stuff is actually much more cat-among-the-pigeonsy for may i think

b-b-but labour is the party of antisemitism iirc

sometimes Corbz needs a break

scruton is in that sweet spot between Scholarly and Obvious Nonsense that sees him widely used as a punching bag for undergraduates

We, too, are pointed towards poetry, music and literature that transcends the philistine label of ‘dead white men’ attached to the canon by today’s identitarian decolonisers. Scruton teaches us to see beyond gender, ethnicity and social class: he offers us a glimpse into what it means to be human.

gushing praise from Spiked on Scrotum's latest magnum opus.

lol ogmor i feel like *i* should be shooting for that spot *composes proposal for next book*

classic Marxist defence of ahistoric humanism from the LM guys there

they're forgetting the old base/superstructure distinction, that's for sure

I guess the Marxism misnomer sounded a much better title than Living Fuckwits!

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

outrage clickbait is a strong tactic and helped the alt right no end -- (literally) owning the libs by making them the fretful carrier pigeons of yr message, putting the centre on the angry flailing defensive backfoot etc etc -- but as a longterm strategy i'm just much less convinced that the future sustainably arrives with many of them in the driving seat

i can totally see fur3di accepting a position as hungarian minister of education though

re-education, surely?

lol no that's a leftwing project

In high school I had a Maoist history teacher who really loved every mile of that long march, but was a bit more fuzzy about the subsequent CCP led bloodbaths etc. Anyway he often had a copy of Marxism Today in his briefcase, which ceased trading in 1991. I suspect there might have been some actual Marxist content in that one.

haha WELL

*settles down, lights elaborate meershcaum pipe w/hammer and sickle stamped on the bowl*

marxism today was the journal of the reformist (= non-tankie, soviet-sceptical) wing of the CPGB, which drew much flak from the splinters for being lightweight yuppie revanchism (bcz some of it was) and for "theorising thatcherism" as a specific development, which (some argued) was simply elaborating on a superstructural mirage with a view to bowing down to it. it was eurocommunist! nay kinnockite!

and yes, hobsbawm was hobsbawm (*sigh*) and martin jacques was a glib and shiny marxo-blairite in manner if not content -- but the weaponised cult-stud work stuart hall (not that one) was doing was important (if probably better manifested elsewhere), and not at all just the id-pol the trots all grumped about. it did have some marxism in, tho very much inflected along the lines of "dudes we are in crisis here, let's think this through" -- and of course the crisis came and one day the USSR was no more and a few months after that the CPGB (chairman nina temple, julian's older sister) wound up its project… or split, into a thing called the democratic left (good name lads) and various truculent continuity tankie microsects

also they didn't pay so i only did two book reviews for them, which is two more than i should have done

(i found an invite to their 1988 xmas party when i was cleaning out some old unopened drawers a couple of years back -- p sure i didn't go though)

what they didn't pay at all, or just peanuts?

luxury communist nuts and berries!

well both times i got the review book for free*, which otherwise i wd have had to pay for -- which was my rationalisation at the time, as well as name-building in book review sections (lol exposure)

*one was a quite fancy book by edward said about music

Strikes me that Buzzfeed isn't giving this comment the attention is merits, it's route-one antisemitism.

Probably because it was written by an ex-Guido writer.

Love the relentless scrutiny on literally ANYTHING Labour handwaved with “they could be in government soon, this stuff matters” while the actual of-this-moment government gets brushed over, and that’s the whole political media doing it.

Corbyn gets grief for being friends with "non-mainstream" Jews and not being proactive enough about party members' antisemitism. Stephen Pollard completely uninterested that JRM turned up at a (pro-Hitler) Britain First dinner, and blamed his butler for not telling him they were a fascist group. and so and so on.... it goes.

I’ve said this before but I do think the criticism of Corbyn and the party’s approach to antisemitism has a lot of merit to it. But the government doesn’t get anywhere near the scrutiny, which I think is the point of frustration for lots of people.

yep, the double standards are just as infuriating as knobheads like Williamson trying to handwave it all away.

JRM turned up at a (pro-Hitler) Britain First dinner, and blamed his butler for not telling him they were a fascist group

Jeeves didn't inform JRM of Sir Roderick Spode's secret weakness, his proprietorship of the lingerie boutique "Eulalie"

Hostile environment policy still thriving

Home Office sends a 4-month-old baby a letter warning him that his mother was likely to be detained, as she had not paid the £6,000 NHS costs for the birth.

Just another day in Theresa May's Britain...https://t.co/KpZJaQ12HU

— Shoaib M Khan (@ShoaibMKhan) November 7, 2018

when Sajid came in as home sec + said he was going to review the hostile environment policy, he didn't mention he had given it 5 stars and decided it was doing a cracking job.

scrolling down that inews page...

• Four-month-old baby sent letter saying his mum was ‘likely to be detained’

• Good squop captures enemy wink: England’s tiddlywinks grandmaster

• Benefits assessor visited gran with cancer and no hair during chemo treatment and said she was was ‘not in enough pain’

• ‘My costume is my escape’ says ex-police officer who cosplays as a princess

• Mother-of-four blinded when a parasite latched to her eye

poll

my fave local story today was hapless crim who chiselled his way into an empty bookies, set an alarm off on an empty ITbox and fled the scene with nothing, gets 1 year!