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

Parsons, even before the Ukip stuff. There's quite a lot of people I don't know on the list but I can't imagine anyone being worse (among these sort of guys).

existence of andrew marr's history of the world bothers me

want to vote de botton I think

Parsons is right in the sweet spot of dickishness, reprehensible politics and cultural worthlessness, some of the others have at least a sliver of a redeeming feature somewhere, although Matthew Parris is getting off pretty easy so far.

I know next to nothing about Alain de Botton and I'm not about to start changing that now.

alain de botton iirc is a ted talk personified

don't know if i can be arsed to run thru all these but i have a plentiful bile tank on standby at all times for Robert Webb, Alain de Botton and Tony Parsons. there are others equally deserving i'm sure.

can't think of any Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation who hasn't been some shade of cunt

rowan came so close to being rly good

but then fucked it up

What's wrong with Robert Webb? Are there two famous people with that name(or many more), just like David Mitchell?

just find Webb & Mitchell unfunny and smug to a degree beyond most of their smug unfunny peers i guess

Rowan Williams was about as good as A of C's get, which might not be saying much, also a big Incredible String Band fan

he's not in my top rank of worstness here by any means, just saying it's a well dodgy institution

Stephen Fry is just the worst.

How so?

I can't chose between Gill and Parsons, but i suspect they are the same person.
I can recall reading Gill in the ST Culture section, circa 90's after a female supermarket worker made a saucy comment about his daughters' name and his rebuttal was at least she won't end up working in a fucking supermarket. I stopped hate-reading him in the mid 90's but he left an indelible impression, especially when he was bragging about his young model girlfriend and relating how comfortable he was being a dirty old man.
Parsons for his laughable, self piteous lone dad shite and that execrable "hateful desert" 9/11 piece he wrote, all his shitty books and for constantly being the most off the money, hectoring cunt on the late show.

yeah I was split between the chimp parsons and gill the goon who shot a baboon

The sheer amount of odiousness on display is just staggering. I mean, really... ANY OF THESE just for starters

Martin Amis
Robert Webb
Stephen Fry
Tony Parsons
Alain de Botton
AA Gill

But I'm kind of circling in on Amis and Gill as the most deeply odious for me personally but it is truly a deep pit of hell (even though I can scrape up tiny modicums of 'well he's not thaaaaaat bad by comparison with the rest of the list' for Owen Jones and Rowan Williams but although I did enjoy a Will Self novel or four, somehow being in this company makes him more odious than I'd normally find him... funny how the mass of them together increases their sheer vileness.)

I don't know much about Amis, don't know anything about Botton, but what have Amis, Botton, Webb and Fry done to deserve being placed next to Parsons and Gill?

You could, maybe, I dunno... google them and find out?

Amis

Let's all interview this cunt and treat him like some demi-god because he just had another appalling novel published and had some very fucking expensive dental work :O=

Martin Amis and his... ~feeling about Muslims~ let him explain them to U. Stephen Fry and his "I'm gay, how am I supposed to know anything at all about what women feel about sex (but let me shoot my mouth off about it, repeatedly, in really gross misogynistic ways, tee hee, I'm so naughty)" or Alain de Botton and "let me condescend to you, badly, about architecture and morality and ~my feelings about porn~ and how the Pain of Being Bald gives me an insight into the suffering of the marginalised" and ugh Webb and just general smug punchability and gross ugh yuck.

I mean, if you wanted to get in a good point about unearned, inherited privilege and how only two dozen families control Britain politically and culturally and will do for the rest of our sodding miserable lives then "Amis" was a pretty good name to pick to get the point across.

I searched them and added the word "controversy" and some of that stuff did come up. Also something about Fry and Poland.

I had been aware of Amis having an English middlebrow king snob reputation.

Webb never came across anymore smug to me than the general bunch of Have I Got News For You regulars, which can be pretty bad but rarely odious enough to get close to Parsons. I thought he seems nice.

thing is i've not thought about 90% of these tosspots in a zillion years. actually thought that clive james was dead tbh

tragically, everybody on this list has their fans.

Clive James cheated on his wife. On a quick search I couldn't find anyone else.

Anything else.

I mean, I guess Webb is kind of a lightweight when compared to the full on tossitude of Parsons and Amis and Gill and Botton and Fry. But give him 20, 30 years and I'm sure he'll get there.

No hate for Matthew Paris?

Robert there isn't necessarily a direct moral imperative to hate all these - Amis's hardman racist posturing is probly objectively worse than, say, de Botton's clueless self-clowning dullness - but hate can come from so many deep, half-examined places, sometimes you just have to accept it and give it your unquestioning support and nurture

Like, I'm sure lots of these small-fry kinda guys individually (outside of that pentateuch of tosspots) are fairly unexceptional. But when thrown together en masse there's just this simmering sense of "ugh ugh ugh" especially when placed up beside that Perry article decrying the preponderance of WhiteDudes.

I am so out of the loop I had to google Matthew Parris, he looks like a bit of a mediocre shithead in comparison to some of these heavyweights.

There's a tiny part of me that wants to think "maybe that's the point, maybe we are supposed to think about all these unexceptionally odious tosspots who floated on in to their positions on their unearned WhiteMale privilege" but I actually think that would be giving the New Statesman too much credit. I think these were the dudes they were going to publish anyway.

had to be all white men including the 'with' section to pull that off

― Ƹ༑Ʒ (imago), Saturday, October 11, 2014 12:29 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Clive James cheated on his wife. On a quick search I couldn't find anyone else.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 11 October 2014 20:51 (14 minutes ago) Permalink

Clive James is in the final stages of leukemia.

ah, you win some, you lose some

worst white man posting on the worst white man on the cover of the new stateman's 'great white male' issue thread

Just finding things I like or don't mind too much. Not claiming these people have never done bad things.

Grayson Perry. Find him quite interesting and I like that he supports old crafts.

Stephen Fry. Liked his comedy on various things, enjoyed his documentaries on language and homophobia. Kinda like QI. Generally like him despite saying sexist things.

Will Self. Found him very funny on numerous occasions. Liked some of his articles and interviews.

Robert Webb. I like Peepshow (latest series was really downhill though). Said some funny stuff on panel shows.

Clive James. Seems like a good guy. My brother loves him.

David Baddiel. Vaguely remember him saying something funny. Seems okay.

Owen Jones. Disagree with him on a few things but I don't think he's a dick.

ah, you win some, you lose some

― Chimp Arsons, Saturday, October 11, 2014 5:11 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Are you happy he's ill? Why?

Well we shan't examine Clive James then because cancer instantly absolves people of any wrong they may have committed, and qualifies them for instant sainthood.

Clive James is in the final stages of leukemia.

I just dodged a cousin's funeral who prematurely died of cancer, bad shit happens to shit people as well.

toxic

aiieee, i do recall reports of him being unwell now, that's fucking rough

Clive James is wonderful.

anyhow, last time i read any james, he was criticizing the bbc for not giving balanced coverage of climate change, not enough representation of the sceptical pov, that sort of thing iirc

Heaven forbid, good thing he's dying I guess

I've only said critical thing about CJ on this board and am not a fan. What I objected to here was people actively scouting out reasons to hate him and others by searching their name + "scandal." It just seems dumb.

I realize the irony of the NS only featuring white male voices in this issue though. Seems like a different issue than looking for reasons to hate the writers individually though.

the only person i've seen googling reasons to hate on this thread has actually been quite positive about half the list

tony parsons "cool guy"

About 11,700 results (0.30 seconds)

A Special Issue on the Great WhiteStraw Man

Heaven forbid, good thing he's dying I guess

don't be a boob treeship

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/michael-hofmann/splashing-through-the-puddles

Its a bumper issue of Great White maleness: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/owen-hatherley/who-will-stop-them

Been watching lots of Simon Munnery recently and this is one of many I liked..

"If a million monkeys were given a million typewriters, eventually one of them might produce the complete works of Shakespeare but to reach it would it be worth wading through four hundred copies of "Money" by Martin Amis?"

man that review of the new amis is really brutal. loled tho cuz i read time's arrow and the gulag one but i had no idea he'd written another fastidious little novel set pompously against the midnight of the century. cmon man.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

brilliant results tbh

Parsons was robbed.

Dylan Jones suffering bigtime from FPTP voting system.

i tried to read the grayson perry lead article (in fairness, i should probably get past the first few 100 words before commenting) but his glee seemed more about the act than the actual message. i.e. i wasnt entirely sure he actually believed what he was trying to say or if he just liked the apparent 'naughtiness' (i was going to say radicalness but naughtiness/outrageousness seems to fit the tone better). but then i just thought that if a white male hadnt written this piece, no one at the NS would probably have cared that much.

AA Gill on the politics of the suit are you fucking kidding me

@georgegalloway
Don't miss my show tonight on @talkRADIO with John Pilger Peter Hitchens Peter Oborne and Julian Assange. 7pm. Mother of all Talkshows.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAei7reXMAkf3NY?format=jpg&name=900x900

couldn't this shit make it up

he's just thinking bout how he could make the planet earth bald

I mean, I guess Webb is kind of a lightweight when compared to the full on tossitude of Parsons and Amis and Gill and Botton and Fry. But give him 20, 30 years and I'm sure he'll get there.

― Jacques Lacan let me rock u; let me rock u, Jacques Lacan (Branwell with an N), Saturday, 11 October 2014 21:52 (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

beat the spread by a good 15 years

Only ONE vote for Matthew Parris, ILX I am not angry with you, just very disappointed.

anyway this is a great nostalgia trip back to a long bygone age where these threads would attract a host of disingenuous "what's wrong with Scumbag X?" posts

"He's got the whole world, in his hands.. he's got the whole world.. in his hands.."

"Not the biggest Baddiel fan but "snivelling 'liberal' apologist for ladbantz bollocks" was his schtick 20 years ago, not now."

yes he's somehow been even almost worse than he was then, but he did stop doing blackface tbf

I'm amused that I didn't even know who Matthew Parris was at the time of this poll. Happier days of ignorant bliss! Bragg is a wanker but I still consider In Our Time a decent program and I guarantee whichever cunt replaces him when he succumbs to dementia will be a thousand times worse than him.

Was gonna say, Webb and Baddiel would have gotten way more votes this time 'round.

And Alain de Botton way less.

Did everyone forget who Will Self was?

45 years ago today (4 November 1977), the New Statesman published this article about divisions in the Communist Party of Great Britain. It is the first written use that I have found of the term ‘tankie’ to describe someone who (uncritically) supported the Soviet Union. pic.twitter.com/plCY3gk9Ge

— Evan Smith (@evansmithhist) November 4, 2022

This is a very … peculiar framing, but I do wonder where all the Statesman’s sugar daddy money has gone. The magazine’s professional irritants (and Will Lloyd, who commissions the worst of them) can’t be that expensive to run. pic.twitter.com/gLn4cK157g

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) November 18, 2023