spiked - the independent online phenomenon

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

Sorry on incoherence, kind of thinking aloud

Does Furedi's 'career' essentially foreshadow Jordan Peterson's or is that too facile (and pointless) a comparison?

feel religion plays a significant part in peterson’s schtick? not really applicable here.

the RCP calling their magazine "living marxism" precisely bcz they had declared that exactly what avil describes, that kind of marxism-as-factory-centred-workerism, was DEAD marxism (bcz the working class was now passive and co-opted and so the proletariat were no longer available as a vanguard: the future would be about intellectuals! and technology!

(this general worry abt the co-opted passivity of the WC was widespread in the 4th international in the 70s: the SWP made a big deal of the "great downturn" and very much turned to recruiting among students and teachers, with much less union activism -- which became a self-fulfilling prophecy)

xp I guess I was more thinking about how the academy becomes like a benign shelter and a legitimising force for all the truth claims these schmucks are wont to make.

here are the times i've talked abt cyberia on other threads lol:

they're a mid-70s offshoot of IS (which underwent many splits at that time: what was left evolved into the swp): the revolutionary communist party then split from the revolutionary communist group* over tactics relating to anti-apartheid (ribald voice from the back: "yes, furedi was pro! etc etc haw haw") -- its organ "living marxism" (so-called bcz everyone else's was declared dead) was active until the mid-90s, when a journalist they libelled during the yugoslav civil war sued it to extinction. they were rebooting at this time as radical libtertarian cyberlefties anyway -- they ran and made a lot of cash from the early internet cafe cyberia -- and (presumably cynically) adapted to harmonise with the tech flavour of libertarianism instead. even in the early 90s the other trot orgs mocked them as a yuppie party

*according to wikipedia, the RCG's paper fight racism! fight imperialism! is still running for nearly 40 years, tho it's a LOOOOONG time since i've seen a copy on sale. rumours that Spiked! is abt to be renamed don't fight racism! don't fight imperialism! are too funny to ignore

― mark s, Friday, December 7, 2018 4:34 PM (ten months ago) bookmarkflaglink

living m's USP in the 80s -- hence the name -- was that all the other available micro- and macro-flavours of marxism were getting everything wrong (hence were "dead m") and important updates were needed in light the shape of the modern world and where science was taking us

i: they made a good gamble on technology -- cyberia was them, and i ran into several lower echelon minions in media tech positions in the 90s, where they were often p good at what they did
ii: they made a good gamble on contrarian columnism in reactionary papers (m!ck hume at the times was the brendon o'n of the 90s)
iii: they seriously fucked up during the yugoslav civil war and LM was sued out of existence by journalists they told lies about
iv: they are well organised and long-game enough to have done well in the (declining, decadent) space of legacy media, by its deeply fuck awful (bcz so easily gameable) standards, but have not yet found a good face for the TV screen and they're so-so at best on social media, quite easily dunkable etc
v: i don't know if he always was but i think their chief guru is now literally just a fascist (he's another orban-fancier)…
vi: … and the many younger minions more or less a cloud of biddable idiots working out his plan, wittingly or unwittingly

― mark s, Wednesday, November 7, 2018 12:38 PM (eleven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

doublechecked wikipedia to see if the RCP actually ever identified as trots -- often an issue in flyspeck sectarian uk groupuscules -- and the answer is apparently YES tho i think they were nonetheless not echt fourth-internationalists despite a thread of connection (unexplored in WP) to the IS: their argt was that the living line of revolutionary marxism had broken and would need to be re-established

anyway what actually caught my eye was that they drew up a document in 1983 called PREPARING FOR POWER so you can't say they weren't optimistic

(their chief source of presence is probably that they were REALLY early in on the internet, running a v successful internet cafe called CYBERIA and putting themsevves around as advisors on e.g. magazine wanting to turn digital -- i worked with a little clutch of them in the mid-late 90s and tbh, terrible politics aside, learnt quite a lot abt computer publishing from them)

― mark s, Monday, August 6, 2018 6:24 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

the journalist who "sued living marxism to extinction" was ed vulliamy, recently spotted commenting sourly on the handke nobel

I wonder if the likes of Fred look at BernieBros in this way

I don't get the comparison.