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

he is sophistry and selfishness personified

Nothing screams erudition quite like using 'Murphy' as a stand-in for all Irish people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/books/boris-johnson-72-virgins.html

as a 2nd gen irish he's radicalising me, I'm ready to enlist for the RA sleeper squad again!

Yeah I see no reason to credit him with intelligence or reasoning, however you modify those words.

if there ever was anything like that there, it's gone now.. that's plain to see.

Tbf we can't and shouldn't rule out the possibility that he was slyly alluding to Sam Beckett's second novel, thus demonstrating his nonpareil knowledge of the Irish avant-garde.

just started reading dante and the lobster yesterday, weirdly!

there's a nice new little edition of it for like a fiver in foyle's. i couldn't help getting it.

Nice. I'll take its 'epiphany' over most of Joyce's.

Would feel no pity, nor piety, if BoJo were boiled alive tbf

One can daydream.

Don't feel like he is 'vile' or anything of the sort. Most of us have met or encountered this species of entitled brat in a pub or on the lol internet. A very common type. Most of the elite are expected to behave like this.

👀

https://i.imgur.com/DNsXXq9.jpg

Waiting for comrade to expand on that...

xyzzzz in elites are not vile shockah!

fussing over johnson's personality as if it's a rare object of interest and concern is foolish, xyzzzz otm

Basically, everyone is posting as I expect them to do.

Ah sure let's get a full list of what's foolish to do itt

it isn't a rare personality

he has private school cunning (a lower form than it usually thinks it is) and a thorough classical education

these are sufficient qualities to imbue him with tremendous self-importance and the ability to reason himself into an ontology wherein he is the puppetmaster and the proles should basically shut up and listen

he is not erudite in the slightest; he is schooled

I'll be the one to go "let's all shrug at the continued normalisation of the far right in Britain" and then someone else can go "I don't see what difference it makes when the hostile environment is still ongoing" and then we'll argue about it until something else happens.

obviously this analysis comes from a place of horrified self-recognition. i too was very good at latin and self-worship. the differences are that i applied brakes, and always regarded ancient greek with some suspicion. boris however is the golden god

"the differences are that i applied brakes"

🧐

well, some mouthy internet tankies applied them

Work not done yet.

Like clockwork, you can all read more about how vile this guy is.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/08/15/boris-johnson-ham-of-fate/

Idk why pointing out that taking the fash line on Leo - not really being Irish - shouldn’t be seen as cool and normal, esp when I hear this far more here, in a country with a far larger 2nd+ gen Indian population, than I do among Irish people or at home. But why bother arguing with Mr Perfectly Calm Accelerationist? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is my tankie friend honestly bothered by my word choice, because ngl it was hardly my best effort & I was half asleep at the time. Happy to withdraw the phrasing if he’ll withdraw the tanks.

Not everything is about what you post.

The best reason for not bothering to express our outrage about these pronouncements is that they are straight out of the Trump playbook and designed to keep Johnson dominating the news cycle. But not talking about him to prevent that is futile because he's going to dominate the news cycle anyway, just like he's going to win anyway and become PM anyway. It's distracting us from the more interesting question of how long he's going to be PM for.

OTOH this leads you perilously close to that awful Jonathan Freedland article from a couple of days ago when he argued that Democrats shouldn't call out Trump's racism against Dem congresswomen because it wouldn't be the "politically smart" thing to do.

he's going to win anyway and become PM anyway

just enjoyed a little moment of

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffilmmakeriq.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F05%2FJaws.gif&f=1

as i remembered anew that this is what's going to happen next week

good luck uk

xp
it puts Freedland's awful takes on UK politics into stark relief, he thinks appeasing a far-right racist is good politics. what a fucking poltroon.

If expressing outrage about how Johnson is vile and a racist is bad, saying he in fact is not vile but just like some bratty guy we all know from the pub is still worse.

It's an off-the-cuff remark, it's not even Trump playbook - it's the way the entitled think. From the tweet I saw he also did say things about Macron and Merkel, and this highlights how damaging any dealings in future will be.

Yes that's the real reason that this actually matters - in that the other over-entitled blowhards you're alluding to are not about to start running the country at a moment of acute national crisis.

stepping back a bit, i wish this had been
(a) a bit better written at the time (it's not awful but it is a bit opaque in places) and thus
(b) better attended to politically -- i think there's a lot in it that's more pertinent now than ever and should have been followed up at the time (except i don't really know how?)

https://newsocialist.org.uk/the-stuplime-object-of-ideology/

Johnson is inveigled into the hearts of the alt right/culture warriors echo chamber in a different way to any of the equally vile gormless racist shits in his party who aren't about to be PM. I don't say for sure that makes him worse or more dangerous but it absolutely gives him a bigger smokescreen to operate within for the hopefully 3 months in power he'll get. No fucker would be bigging up Hunt in the same way as BoJo's media buds are prepared to do for him.

Not saying that calling him racist is 'bad' as such. Was trying to broaden out from this blonde white person to his class and the way they think, as a response to some of the posts following gyac's original take.

if this thread were good no one would be referred to by name

the reason to not focus on Johnson is not bc it would hurt him but bc the massive & deeply engrained overemphasis of leadership as a factor in politics has been grossly distorting analysis and thinking abt politics. it's a framing that benefits the right and fucks the left

That New Socialist piece is good

agree w that ogmor, partic in re thinking about what to actually DO

perhaps ironic thing for me to say coming just after that NS piece but still

Yeah ogmor's right but these threads are pretty much all catharsis no praxis

ilx catharsis: yell more on this thread, FP turrican
ilx praxis: start a different thread, FP Fred B

Also emphasis on personalities doesn't so much distort analysis as it is and always has been the whole of analysis at least within the non-specialist media

Idg why saying it’s unacceptable is controversial, maybe if politicians hadn’t been so complicit in racism for their own gain he wouldn’t see it as an atmosphere where he feels comfortable questioning Varadkar’s Irishness. Sorry it’s so deeply unoriginal.

Questioning Varadkar's Irishness and joking that they're all called Murphy over there, aren't they? He's a cunt.

Ok but the Murphy part isn’t about “lol all Irish look the same”, it’s about Leo not having a typically Irish name. Like the Murphy bit by itself is just shite banter.

No10: “The Prime Minister has today approved two new appointments to the Trade Envoy programme. Ian Austin MP has been appointed as the Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Israel.”

— Kevin Schofield (@PolhomeEditor) July 18, 2019

No, they don't all look the same but they're all called Paddy or Mick, and I thought they had a sense of humour over there, they're as bad as the Jocks.

This is true, my only excuse is that I’m on this classic account & dying

[????] pic.twitter.com/Rxe0GD7ees

— Wes Tweeting (@westweetin) July 19, 2019