spiked - the independent online phenomenon

oh wait we still have david cameron so i guess that covers all those bases [/trenchant social commentary]

O'Neill. Daniels. Two men.

man this site has really gone hard on the rape denialism in the past few weeks.

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/spiked-online.com/authors/BrendanONeill/headline_new.jpg

As well as being the editor of spiked, Brendan is also a columnist for the Big Issue and Reason. He writes widely for a variety of other publications, including the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Australian. He is the author, most recently, of A Duty to Offend: Selected Essays (2015).

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/spiked-online.com/authors/BrendanONeill/headline_new.jpgI! I said https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/spiked-online.com/authors/BrendanONeill/headline_new.jpgI!

What you lhttps://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/spiked-online.com/authors/BrendanONeill/headline_new.jpghttps://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/spiked-online.com/authors/BrendanONeill/headline_new.jpgking at, you little rich bhttps://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/spiked-online.com/authors/BrendanONeill/headline_new.jpgy!

powerful

Claire Fox, talking about people on the left posts overreacting to Trump's tweets, "... and I'm from the Left". Hard to follow that one.

Seems like programme makers have discovered Spiked, so expecting more appearances from these twats.

― A Fifth Beatle Dies (Tom D.), Wednesday, 9 March 2016 10:58 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Three in the last 24 hours: Big Bren himself, throwing his support behind the Boris/Gove/JRM coup; specky freedom of speech at all costs 12-year old; "the biggest problem women have today are these middle class feminists" middle class woman.

exterminate the brutes is probably in order at this point

Brendan O'Really? putting on a fine save-a-Trump performance right now, what with the campaign against the President by the liberal mainstream media and Hilary not exactly being squeaky clean either, dontchaknow. Time to forget Hillsborough too btw.

I'd love to see Brendan getting beaten to death by a gang of Scouse football hooligans! But let's not forget he is friendly with some 90's ILM indie counterculture heroes, who are apparently beyond criticism.

Oh who?

The Stereolab connexion.

Need a bit more than that? Brendan's buddies w/ Laetitia?

I doubt it. But they all drink from the same cup. The Furedi Cup.

lol! here we go again!

band with lifelong association with right-wing posh arseholes are completely blameless... again!

if you like their music it doesn't really matter, but apparently taking the piss out of them on message boards is out of control wokeness!

you're not really responding to anyone itt rn

well I am and cross referencing another thread, tbf.

james

no one posting on this thread since the revive said anything in defense of sadier on that other thread

I was responding to LBI's post.

I might have misinterpreted it, but that was what I was responding to.

Lol @ 'Furedi cup'

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-49435041

fuck the bbc and their need for "balance" which means we have to read the opinion of a spiked online/policy exchange moron in this piece

Surprised to see she isn’t one of the many pricks from there appearing on a select committee this year.

Dark laugh at her byline on this piece of shit paired with the box that covers the top half of the page.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/decolonise-curriculum-movement-re-racialises-knowledge/

[to the tune of Transformers]

Nazis in disguise

These popped up again on the main thread but I'll ask here instead of derailing.

I still don't really understand where these are coming from. I could understand if they were Strasserite/Nationalist but they just seem to occupy the same space as the Spectator. I guess they're sort of a UK equivalent of Rave Dubin / Pim Tool but they aren't organic in any way, and Spiked seems like it kind of is and has a real audience? Identity politics for people who hate identity politics? (but thats kind of centrists, though I guess thats for people who are blind to the fact they have an identity)

Is Nagle one of them yet?

some good background on the Right Wing Pundits thread.

better link.

It makes sense to think of them primarily as an astroturfing exercise / extension of a libertarian think tank, rather than a media outlet with a significant popular following.

I had thoughts last night that I'm too tired to go deep into right now but in brief:

I wonder if the best way to look at them is thru the insane fissiparity of left politics throughout its UK history, where being correct and maintaining the true faith is infinitely more important than building an actual collective force capable of political action. And where that purity seems to mean attacking any thought that deviates from your own.

Plus obviously they're financially supported by libertarian capital and they're all really cosplaying middle class tools, which shouldn't be overlooked.

It makes sense to think of them primarily as an astroturfing exercise / extension of a libertarian think tank, rather than a media outlet with a significant popular following.

Plus obviously they're financially supported by libertarian capital and they're all really cosplaying middle class tools, which shouldn't be overlooked.

which makes them Rave Dubin and Pim Tool but for a UK audience....but they were 'real' at some point, and have something of a 'real' audience, but maybe just a small percentage

I guess actually this makes them sort of a RB Leipzig or Salford City?

some good background on the Right Wing Pundits thread.

― Fizzles,

Oh yeah, I thought I had seen a better link than this one. Its strange that this sphere has such a long history in the UK - which is what makes me think its "real" or at least partially real, and not just think thank funded stuff.

as i say, that's where the micro-factions of UK communism come in

There is a huge question mark over whether they were always like this. From a Guardian article about Living Marxism 19 years ago:

It is a meeting of strange minds. Until its closure, LM more or less aped the conservative rightwing political, economic and cultural libertarian arguments being pushed heavily in the US by free market organisations a like the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and the Cato Institute. These are all funded by industry but are just the tip of a vast network of “freedom” groups all linked intellectually and semi-formally by the loose coalition known as the Freedom Network.

The meeting of minds in the libertarian zone in Britain allowed Forest, the pro-smoking group funded by the tobacco in dustry, to organise a debate (Blair’s Britain - The Tyranny of Political Correctness) in the Groucho club last month under the institute’s umbrella with Dr Masden Pirie of the free market Adam Smith Institute in the chair.”We get on very well with these people,” said Dr Pirie.

Another rightwing think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, helped organise speakers for a debate last week on war crimes at University College London.

The source of the LM-institute’s funding has always been a source of wonderment. Living Marxism had 3,000 subscribers and LM rose to 10,000 but the sums never seemed to add up. Fox says everyone worked for free and it was always difficult to balance the books.

Furedi has been at this grift for decades.

Spiked seems like it kind of is and has a real audience

If by a real audience you mean BBC and Sky commissioning editors, that is. The Taxpayers Alliance must hate them because they've been pushed way down the Right Wing Rentamouth Arseholes list and even Kate Andrews is having to fight for airtime. Troubing times.

By real audience I meant pre-recent(ish) media boosting (or possibly pre-branding). I don't mean the BBC etc, that most assuredly, is not real

But ShariVari has just debunked that idea anyway!

time for the periodic re-up for this Pandora’s Docs piece on the links between Adam Curtis and Frank Furedi. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to Curtis balanced but does contain some analysis of Furedi, How He Came to Be and What He Is.

balanced

I can’t say I know all that much about Curtis to comment on that part (although his thing about people with ocd got my back up), but fuck me, that’s a really bracing and thorough piece. Thanks for sharing.

The victim culture thing is quite otm except it seems as though these days they’ve switched from merely scorning anyone who is structurally or personally oppressed to actively advocating in favour of the oppressor. Which ofc is fascist as fuck.

I'm going to have to spend some time going through that piece as there is a lot to get through, but I disagree with some of the analysis of how he talks about Eduard Limonov for example, he is not painted as a heroic figure but as one with dangerous ideas, especially dangerous for how attractive they are. On the whole it seems like a post-AWOBMOLG rebuke (the series was a mess, probably his weakest work) but feel like Hypernormalisation cleared up a lot of these questions.

wait, the source of at least some of their money in the 90s was known: they ran cyberia, the first (or one of the first) internet cafes in London, and made a mint from it?

they were in early and in smart on the technical side of converting print media to digital, i worked with a couple of their drones on this in the late 90s in the sight and sound production office and they were very good on tech stuff -- they went on to do the same for the guardian

even in the early 90s they were busily organising public debates, i was on the panel for one of them (and there were a couple of wire reviewers who were RCP spods lol)

(i feel i've told this story before)

right-wing trash in a left-wing guise is his contention, via associating Curtis with post-Marxist libertarianism of Frank Furedi ... His question about who you are co-opting when you say 'we', and then looking at Curtis's fellow travellers, is fairly persuasive. Though sometimes I think the piece sometimes confuses Curtis's fascination for approval.

was my original assessment. no desire to drag Curtis into this but the brief summary of Furedi’s noxious progress is useful, especially why his targets were his targets (competition for radical campus attention, basically)

xp to camaraderie.

i feel you’ve told this many times before mark!

Interesting piece on Curtis - fair bit to absorb! I'm not super familiar with Curtis as I've found his stuff irritating, and difficult to watch. I feel like Curtis was one of the first to make Putin into this all-powerful figure? that now seems default for mainstream media, particularly since 2016)

Going back to the spiked people, I'm getting a sense of Trotskyist/Communist left in the 60s/70s the viewed itself like those Soviet posters, as strong men that were going to do great things, storm factories and other fantasies. And that by the late 1980s that was losing the battle with reality. And that the feminists and the environmentalists were a sign of weakness and how are we going to storm the factories with these losers in our midst, wanting to make sure we don't stand on a daffodil on the way to the factory?

And the wish their ranks were made up of miners and not souped up horticulturalists. And somewhere along the line a fetishising of the miners and growing intolerance and hatred for those perceived as weak, and who hadn't performed or been up to scratch?

Which then ties in with the Great Man stuff. A fetish for strength and power that needed a new vehicle once the illusion the old vehicle was going to work finally died

All grift aside, this feels a pretty organic process