Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

adam tomkins has a cheek to crow about stirring sectarian sentiment as well

xp those boring cunts have been using that for ages, they’re reddit-level tedious now. What next, a Ken Livingstone-on-the-phone meme?

Oh dear... Change UK activists are so unhappy with the campaign shitshow so far that 50 of them have written to the party leadership to complain
- lack of materials
- no election agents
- no candidate info/pics
- activists forced to stay at home pic.twitter.com/NVC4MNJ0qX

— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) April 30, 2019

This is a dishonourable, cynical attempt to damage the reputation of @FMcAveety, who has oft sought to bridge sectarian divides, even though it can be hugely challenging. It raises a serious question about the fitness of the current leader of Glasgow City Council to hold office. https://t.co/V1JWfHzcQS
— Paul Sweeney MP (@PaulJSweeney) April 30, 2019
― ... and the crowd said DESELECT THEM (||||||||), Tuesday, April 30, 2019 10:33 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark

a bit of a stretch to say it's stoking sectarianism. the council gave rangers the KB when they wanted a fanzone. frank mcaveety (whose religious and football supporting background i don't need to clarify) supported calls for transparency over the decision, snp group leader in the council posted a picture of him in the director's box at ibrox to suggest he was pally with the execs at rangers and that this influenced his position.

Ty to the mod who nuked all the multiples & saved us from the horror of Gapes splashed all over the thread

xp. a lot of the backlash to not giving rangers the fanzone was ironically enough very sectarian

was not aware of that context, thanks - should have known better than to take tomkins at face value. my bad

i mean maybe there's more to it?

it's definitely a bad look on two counts: shitty thing to suggest is a good angle of attack, the fact that someone then leaked it shows that things are obviously not very rosy in the snp group in GCC

yeah clearly something going on in that group with a couple of high profile resignations recently amid allegations of bullying, “lack of consensus building” and poor collegiality

Appreciate this video (which I hopefully post only once):

It’s time to act. pic.twitter.com/ebVkAvbcj5

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) April 30, 2019

there was a vote in the scottish parliament on declaring a climate emergency last month. all labour MSPs voted against: motion S5M-16555 under decision time here:
http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/report.aspx?r=12025

also: CORBYN IN RACIST PREFACE STORM

XRs prison advice is essentially brainwashing.

Their advice sheet basically boils down to "if jail is terrifying you then it's your fault for being an egotist, so actually you should stop making it about you or you're failing other people" pic.twitter.com/aotibe4UJB

— Death Bezos (@Typhonatemybaby) May 1, 2019

also: CORBYN IN RACIST PREFACE STORM

It's almost beyond parody now but they keep trying.

Both basically and essentially, you truly are spoiling us, internet user typhonatemybaby.

Corbyn's brand will never recover, apparently.

are the same people slamming Corbyn today going to cancel all the other anti-semitic/white supremacist writers from centuries past? usually they are the ones making the biggest noise about the pc mob making ahistorical judgements on the illustrious top dogs of the empire era.

he's fucked if he gets caught reading some Gogol.

the crimes of some dead white men are more amenable to forgiveness than others, it would seem https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/churchill-was-a-racist-but-still-a-great-man-vnhkhfnpm

it's almost as if these arguments are made in bad faith and only as a stick to beat political opponents 🤔

Writing a foreword in 2011 would seem an opportunity for some historical judgement, just saying like.

I'm sure the publishers might have been more interested in highlighting the anti-imperialism of the work rather the writer being a cunt and would have maybe edited out anything like that?

It's almost as if there are some elections this week.

That's a pretty big maybe.

If I was in the business of selling books, I'd think (small) maybe .. say.. highlighting Gogol's glaring antisemitism in the preface to Dead Souls might not be a good move. There is plenty of material out there on the subject.. just saying .. I mean wtf do I know!

If it's like two sentences out of 900 pages would it be mentioned? Maybe. I'd have to read the book though. I read stuff all the time that makes me cringe, there's a horrible glaring bit of racism in Henry Green's "Party Going" that I've never once seen referenced in forewords, introductions, critical studies, reviews etc

Iirc Hobson is known to be anti Semitic but in other works it’s a lot more obvious. Corbyn should have disavowed the views - the work can stand up on its own without being seen to gloss over Hinson’s belief that Jewish people control the banks/are behind wars - but it’s a pretty canonical text and others have mentioned that Tristram Hunt has done a programme on him that doesn’t mention this.

Put it this way; if it was anyone but Corbyn it’s not a story, because people write forewords all the time without bothering to disavow the bad deeds/views of the authors/subjects. I mean, Boris Johnson’s outrage about criticism of Churchill tells me exactly how worthwhile reading his book about him would be.

But Corbyn has a history of associating with dodgy types and stuff like the mural incident, and so people can ask the question “Did he not see it or did he just not care?”

I haven't read anything by J. A. Hobson so I look at the wiki page which went from no mention of antisemitism at 0504 today to his currently being one of the most influential English antisemites of the period with a new antisemitism subsection to the criticism section so jeremy corbyn will likely be given an opportunity to amend the foreword in light of this information

That one brief bit in At Swim-Two-Birds where yer man lapses into whimsical cowboy pastiche, n-words and all, took me aback I have to say xps, different time of course and probably making a fair point about yankee culture or something but still. not cancelling the damn thing mind

his anti-semitism is mentioned in passing in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, but isn't remarked upon further, presumably because his views reflected or at least weren't completely out of step with the prevailing attitudes of his times. If this is the case for the ODNB it's difficult to see why Corbyn should have picked up on this in a preface which seems to have been about the work and not about the man.

"But Corbyn has a history of associating with dodgy types and stuff like the mural incident, and so people can ask the question “Did he not see it or did he just not care?”"

The political football also means it's hard to judge to give any kind of definitive answer. No doubt we'll be here again.

Even if he just stuck to the Drains + Manholes Appreciation Society crowd, they'd probably find some drain in his collection that has what looks like an impression of Hitler's face on it. But he can be a dozy old bastard sometimes. That mural incident was totally embarrassing. But mild compared to Boris and the Kipling quoting incident in Myanmar or JRM turning up at a pro-Nazi group dinner.

I was thinking as I wrote my post above about Thackeray, and how I had been idly reading some piece about Vanity Fair that mentioned the novel was originally serialised in Punch. I didn’t know that, I thought, and while reading Thackeray’s Wikipedia page I found what better-read people itt will already know - that Thackeray was one of Punch’s most famous contributors. But I also found that he was mainly responsible for the magazine’s coverage of Irish people, and I felt really uncomfortable reading this, because I instantly recalled being in history class the first time I saw these infamous Punch cartoons of Irish people and getting the nature of anti-Irish sentiment in a way that cuts through immediately. It’s really funny because you can read about policy and deaths caused towards Irish people and know that they thought of Ireland and its people as lesser, but there’s something really visceral about looking at cartoons of Irish people depicted as subhuman that just smacks that point home.

Does it ruin Vanity Fair for me? No, but it makes me think more critically of Thackeray, who clearly saw me and people like me as less than, even when they were starving and dying without dignity. I always sort of sideeye any mentions of Punch that go on about how great and satirical and biting it was without mentioning how fucking racist it was too.

But yeah, I entirely get the criticism of this foreword.

Somehow this latest Corbyn attack was not a Guardian exclusive despite this article from 2015 referencing the foreword
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2015/sep/14/jeremy-corbyn-victory-were-visible-in-2008

I mention this because in Sunday’s Observer, the Cameron henchman and born-again egalitarian Steve Hilton, reminds the “political elite and their allies” that they are “the causes of Corbyn”. Why? Because they let those who didn’t cause the crisis bear most of the burdens of readjustment while those who did got away with it.

funny that Corbynism was being identified as the main problem back in them halcyon days of austerity, and preparing for the remain victory in the big ref!

This seems fair to me:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/jeremy-corbyn-blind-antisemitism-hobson

Now, plenty of people have spoken in general about Hobson – who was indeed an important and influential thinker on the British liberal left – without feeling the need to note Hobson’s bigoted views of Jews, which were hardly uncommon in that period. Fair enough. But Corbyn was not merely referring to Hobson and his thought in general: he was writing an extended assessment of a specific text – engaging directly with it. And yet across the eight pages Corbyn wrote, there is not so much as an acknowledgment of the racism within that text.

He might have made the move Finkelstein himself made when writing recently about Churchill, in a column headlined: “Winston Churchill was a racist but still a great man”.

It's a preface to a book of non-fiction that contains explicitly antisemitic passages, as Freedland demonstrates. Surely this should have warranted at least a passing mention on the prefacer's part? Surely whataboutism does nothing to address the issue at hand?

You mean the issue of why no-one other than Jeremy Corbyn has ever been attacked for ignoring JA Gibson's anti-Semitism?

xp did you read the other comments I made earlier on this specific point?

... Hobson

It’s ok, I called him a different name earlier too

You mean the issue of why no-one other than Jeremy Corbyn has ever been attacked for ignoring JA Gibson's anti-Semitism?

Were the others writing prefaces to one of his books?

I don't take issue with your overall analysis, gyac – it seems as fair to me as Freedland's.

"And yet across the eight pages"

a whole eight pages, there was about 38 pages in the Gogol short stories book preface- that doesn't mention antisemitism once iirc. Not saying it is right - but I presume when you get these gigs the brief isn't to accentuate everything dodgy about the writer. And why the fuck should some dilettante LOTO be judged differently at the preface game than literary experts who do much more long-winded prefaces, and commit the same faults?

Literary critics aren't politicians and a book of short stories isn't a book of political economics.

I don't see it as an anti-semite smoking gun or anything but it's fair grounds for a "blind eye" criticism.

according to the wiki page for J. A. Hobson's Imperialism which included no reference to antisemitism before 0525 today:

Hobson was one of the most influential English antisemites of the period,[3][4] and while Imperialism does not contain the "violent anti-Jewish crudities" of his prior works,[5] it does include an accusation that there was an international conspiracy of Jewish financiers.[6][7] According to history professor Norman Etherington this section of financiers seems irrelevant to Hobson's economic discourse, and was probably included since Hobson truly believed it.[8]

Of course, I read it last night!

Thanks to the FT’s chief political correspondent for making my point for me (re: Churchill)

woke left: John Hobson’s casual racism was merely the product of his era

also woke left: Tear down all statues of the monstrous Winston Churchill

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) May 1, 2019