Let's talk about Vice Magazine

Pardon? Why are you equating dress sense with sexuality? Aside from the fact that there are gay people involved in both.

In any case, you haven't responded to my point that using the word "nigger" or "paki" in an attempt to 'reclaim' it isn't actually any more constructive towards race relations than liberals not using the word at all, probably less so.

Short, mildly cryptic answer: their explanations -- in the form of their books -- were what were cutting-edge and subversive about them.

I love my mum and sister, but they can be a right pair of bigots sometimes (they move in pretty varied circles and like the Vice editors claim friendships with black people/gay people/etc so in no way are the Vicies subversive). The horrible thing is, they won't back down when I tell them they're talking utter racist shite; apparently if you're white and work 40 hours a week you receive special dispensation to disparage anyone on benefits, to moan about 'third-world' immigrants, to judge which black people are black people, and which are 'deserving' of some other epithet. It bugs the shit out of me that they cop these attitudes. What to do?

Oh no no no...I'm chiming in agreement with you, Suzy.

Since someone raised Freud, we could do worse than to think about this question in the light of his theory of 'the narcissism of small differences'. This says that the people who really hate each other are the ones who are identical in all but a few small details. Sibling rivalry, for instance, or the feud between Jews and Arabs (both semitic), or that between socialists and communists.

The only person I know who uses the word Paki is my Bangladeshi ex-wife. She has a brother called Shaki, and the family calls him 'Shaki the Paki'. It's an affectionate insult (Bangladeshis and Pakistanis don't get on, for historical reasons).

At the same time as Bangladeshis are dissing people as 'Pakis' for 'hot' reasons (and I mean by 'hot' that there's passion and history in the slight), you get the government running poster campaigns saying 'To call someone a Paki is racism. Don't do it!' In contrast to the hot yet historical illiberalism of the street, you get cold, institutionalised (what Vice would call 'hippy') utopian liberalism trying to stamp out 'the narcissism of small differences' in the name of the sort of value-blindness that causes institutions to put a blindfold on their statues of Justice and say 'All citizens are equal'. It's the high-minded 'Should World' of the Courts versus the lowdown 'Is World' of the streets.

What Vice is clearly saying is 'We live in the world of Is, not Should. We keep it real. We use the 'hot' definitions of the streets and not those of 'cold' liberalism.' But they use a different kind of liberalism to justify this; they say 'We are living amongst the people we are 'slighting' with these epithets, and we're using them because that's the language they use. It would be presumptuous and pompous of us to use cold liberal terms in that context. We aren't the KKK, but we also aren't hippies. What unites the KKK and hippies -- the cold left and the cold right -- is their abstraction of minorities into devils or angels. We're showing the reality, warts and all.'

And it's at that point that you have a personal reaction to what the Vice editors are saying. Are you the kind of person who thinks that the more humans know about each other -- the gritty details, the hot emotions -- the more they'll accept humanity, or are you the kind of person who thinks that we can tolerate each other only thanks to massive doses of wishful thinking, abstraction and distance? And might it be that your 'cold liberalism' is not just a kind of passive Utopianism but a way of burying your head in the sand -- because you can? 'I won't confront these issues until they get less emotive,' you say. 'In the meantime I'll just try not to offend or hurt anyone'.

You may think that -- essentially the white flight attitude, refuge in the 'burbs -- is the solution to race relations problems. Or you may think that getting close enough to the battle front to feel the heat of 'the narcissism of small differences' would be a better start. Because, at the very least, if you join the battle things are going to get more complex and confusing. You're going to dilute some of the clear demarcations, lift some of the earnestness and, frankly, introduce quite a lot of surrealism and irony into a tense stand-off. Maybe somebody will laugh, and suddenly the whole situation will change. I'm sure there was laughter -- first nervous, then relieved -- when the first 'Queer as fuck' T shirt hit the streets.

I think we got pissed off only after we wrote what came naturally to us and it offended people. We were determined to leave it in. It was just the way we talked. It’s surprising how brainwashed by
hippies most of our generation is.

is claim their own language/stance as natural and authentic and everyone else's as reprogrammed, which hardly recognises the kind of complex intervention in competing semantics that Momus is claiming for them. I think to grant them this is as foolish as assuming there is one hot language, one real, of the streets (one real hot street ha ha). I'm not disputing the real of anyone's experience, but we're talking about mediation and representation here, where there's surely no single or essential real. or Given that the Vice people lay claim to an unreflexive rootedness in 'what's really going on', who is allowed to confront Vice and say 'that's not my real' (as opposed to 'that's not (morally) right')? (I just read Dan's point above, which may answer that question).

BTW Momus: props for a consistent and inventive defence of your position and almost incredible good humour in the face of sometimes nasty disagreement on this thread. i have thought this through hard and admitted a lot more ambiguity into my basic disagreement as a result of his points (along with lots of other ppl's, obv).

No white person has carte blanche to call me "nigger".

I think Dan nails it here. There's an assumption being made that I don't think exists about the viability of said carte blanche.

(PS: Damn, I hope you didn't have e-mail notifications turned on.)

Vice published Russ Waterhouse's interview with Violent Ramp but that's the only thing I've read of theirs.
Seems like a pretty forward-thinking staff to print it all things considered.

This is what I'm talking about with the "an editor butchered a friend's piece then claimed to a friend of this friend that he "wrote it." According to Russ (one of my best friends), they butchered the piece, then a little while later one of Russ's friends went to a party wearing a Wolf Eyes t-shirt (members of Violent Ramp are in Wolf Eyes). Somebody from Vice (I'm not sure who, I don't know the guys) said to him (paraphrasing) "oh they're pretty cool, did you see my [emphasis added] interview with Violent Ramp?" or something to that effect (I've heard this all third-hand from Russ). Seemed to me to be a pretty shitty thing to do, albeit minor.

I'm annoyed that I can't link to the Vice Throwdown part 2 sequel thread here for some reason. Nabisco never answered my question there. I'm still interested.

I like Slayer.