Agonies of the Left: Oh, Bitter Tears
In sport you can only dominate your opponents, sometimes and only briefly. Leftism offers the promise of dominating everyone.
You know, that sort of person.
Capitalist Psy-Ops. She used to be funny, now people just laugh at her.
People with more money than you are fiends.
Unlike lovely socialists.
They made you fat. Because they’re evil.
Put down the cake they made you buy and decapitalize your mind.
What’s a leftwing narcissist to do? See also this.
The perfect accessory for the passive-aggressive. “How dare you arrest me? I have a child in tow!”
Consciousness raising.
Thought crime.
A point of work being to avoid destitution. See also this.
New agony discovered. Hurrah.
We are like North Korea.
Laurie embraces the market.
If in doubt.
Part 8 in an ongoing series. Do please keep them coming. We have so much to learn.
Update:
Welcome, Instapundit readers. Our full catalogue of agonies can be found via the links below.
Think of it as a sociological collage of the left and its fretting, or a psychological profile. Or a warning to your children.
For newcomers, the reheated series should give you a flavour of what else goes on here.
Q30 – and THAT’S the sheer genius of capitalism. Or, maybe Patriarchy. Anyway – we’ve got Laurie coming and going.
George Monbiot climbs up on the cross:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/08/philistinism-nature-scientific-ignorance-money
“That, I suppose, is the price of confronting the power of money.”
She lives in England but she hates summer? Gotta agree with Tim T here — you can understandably hate summer if you live in Las Vegas or Miami, but in England?
Q30,
It’s all very confusing.
I fear you’ve given it more thought than Laurie did. But the gist, I think, is that she and her peers are against something or other, something you won’t understand, and are therefore terribly radical. And special. And heroic. They’re shapers of minds. And totally non-conformist. They must be, really. They tell us so often enough.
dicentra,
INSTALANCHE!
Blimey. Someone help me move the sofa. And put out the good towels.
She therefore placed her 4-year-old daughter on heavily used train tracks.
Not putting your children on train tracks is just bourgeois conformism.
Not putting your children on train tracks is just bourgeois conformism.
And then of course there are those who fret about not being able to commit crimes – sorry, take part in “direct action” – because they have children. Or pets. Or jobs. Whatever, it’s all terribly unfair. If only the police would stop arresting people who obstruct public highways and smash shop windows.
Such “false consciousness” is even more common in the U.S., which truly annoys the Left.
Indeed, they have constructed their own cottage industry to study this phenomenon in such works as Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas.
I scarcely need to point out that Laurie isn’t keen on the Boat Race either. It’s insufficiently socialist. And an appreciation of sporting accomplishment must always be policed through a lens of leftwing politics. Those are the rules, apparently.
Feeling superior to other people is the only sport allowed for lefties like LP.
I suspect Laurie Penny hates the summer because most other people like it, and because it is associated with leisure and well-being and other bourgeois things. Ultimately, it is other people’s happiness that she can’t stand.
Ultimately, it is other people’s happiness that she can’t stand.
Well, there’s an urge to “problematise” the mundane and thereby signal one’s own intellectual and moral superiority. It’s what egalitarians do. One thing this series has illustrated is the tendency towards pretentious contrarianism. It can get quite competitive, even surreal, and there’s a distinct whiff of arrested adolescence. And as we’ve seen, quite vividly, a great deal of leftist display is rooted in a rejection of adulthood.
I blame Thatcher. And Blair. Kids brought up on neoliberal individualism and myths of meritocracy. And erosion of vocabulary of injustice
Jesus wept. 13 years of NuLabour and decades of lefty state education and the voters *still* don’t want communism. Agony!
and the voters *still* don’t want communism. Agony!
We, the general public, must be befuddled by some dastardly rightwing mind control – “false consciousness” or capitalist “Psy Ops”. Clearly, what’s needed is a more pervasive and forceful system of correction. Because obviously there’s something wrong with us. And the people who say such things, from Gramsci and Marcuse to the great thinker Roseanne Barr – don’t seem willing to consider a more obvious possibility. That the product they’re peddling has something terribly wrong with it.
As indicated by the kinds of personalities who find socialism so titillating.
But did you promise your teenaged self you wouldn’t ever like tennis? Because that would make your dislike much more noble-sounding.
I was nonconformist once, back in the ’80s. It just got old after a few
hoursmonthsyears.Who knew stupid took so much thought?
In sport you can only dominate your opponents, sometimes and only briefly. Leftism offers the promise of dominating everyone.
*applause*
I love the direct juvenile narcissism of promising her teenage self. Hysterical.
The only thing I would like to promise my teenage self is a good slap and instruction: pull yourself together.
Cass,
Well, it’s been suggested before, here and elsewhere, that radical leftism is what often happens when people who want to dominate others are really crap at sports. Urges will tend to find an outlet, and Marxism and its variants offer enormous scope for such behaviour. It’s an ideology of coercion; a political fig leaf for vindictive feeling.
A couple of years ago, thirty or so local students gathered down the road to wave their communist paraphernalia, including hammer-and-sickle-banners. They looked absurd. They seemed obvious to, or indifferent to, the mismatch between their image of themselves as virtuous and heroic and the actual connotations of their symbols and deadening ideology. At the time, I couldn’t help thinking they might at least have had the courtesy to be more honest. Declaring a taste for communism – declaring oneself a Marxist – is rather like saying, “If I had my way, a monstrous state apparatus would control you and ruin the lives of everyone you care about.” And given the boneyard legacy of Marxoid dogma, the people who want such things don’t seem to appreciate that one has shown some restraint in not slapping them insensible.
You know we’ve reached a sad time when it’s impossible anymore to even parody the moronic gibberish that emanates from these people.
Thanks for making me throw up! The above spoiled ‘children’ highlighted above have obviously never faced the hardships and rewards of reality, and as a result of being coddled and left with no responsibilities for themselves, they’ve had to invent their own pseudo hardship and drama out of sheer boredom, it’s a misguided search for relevancy by the irrelevant. This is why utopias fail, those who don’t produce but live off the largess of others simply become starved for attention as they are deserving of none themselves, and once you have a majority of the population as dependent fools like these, there goes your civilization.
Laurie dislikes summer maybe because in the warm weather you get a lot of the lower orders out on the street in ill-fitting or far too revealing cheap clothes (or even showing off nasty tattoos with sex as a theme) and as any good socialist knows, the riff-raff should all be indoors being quiet.
The more I encounter people like this, the more they seem like they can’t possibly exist in the real world. I know they do of course, it’s just that they’re so out of touch with reality, and in such a perverse and destructive way, that their very existence seems contrived somehow.
Looks matter. It’s an immutable fact. I reckon you can put too much truck into looks but that’s a separate issue.
their very existence seems contrived somehow.
Having compiled eight of these things, what strikes me is the utter lack of stoicism. For all the radical bluster, their worldview seems… disabling.
[ Added: ]
In other, entirely unrelated news… Maleness is also upsetting to many of Laurie’s friends.
Ah, the frontier spirit.
Ah, the frontier spirit.
Makes you wonder who’s going to build their socialist utopia. I can’t see this bunch of neurotic posers building anything.
I can’t see this bunch of neurotic posers building anything.
I think we can safely assume this chap isn’t the rugged, reliable frontier type. He’s more the fretting-about-whether-his-straightness-is-oppressing-people-on-Twitter type. Which is a new and thrilling type of maleness, one previously unknown to me.
I… I…
*pours drink*
Good idea, Joan.
“Keep working, keep drinking – and take your television’s advice.”
— Firesign Theatre
I can’t see this bunch of neurotic posers building anything.
Except gulags.
“I wildly dislike twee patriotism”
And yet she gets moist whenever she sees a hammer-and-sickle waving in the breeze.
Our friend Penny:
Masculinity + maleness are things that upset and bother many of the men I know…
Ah, sweety, you don’t know any men, just boys.
Masculinity + maleness are things that upset and bother many of the men I know…
Yes, they “bother” this female too, but not in the way Laurie means. But more in a Rodgers and Hart way, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered:
I’ll sing to him, each spring to him
And worship the trousers that cling to him
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I
I also loathe tennis, but it would never occur to me to think of my dislike as a revolutionary act. Penny Dreadful’s solipsistic notion that every jejune thought that bounces around inside her empty skull is evidence of a DEEP THINKER is quite, quite repulsive. Her self-absorption has reached such a density that, like a black hole, no illumination can escape it. Her forays into Twitterdom have much the same intellectual heft as someone Instagramming their bowel movements.
Don’t give her any ideas.
David Gillies,
I also loathe tennis, but it would never occur to me to think of my dislike as a revolutionary act.
It’s why leftism, as practiced by Laurie and co, is so exhausting. Among less neurotic people, it’s very hard to care whether someone is interested in tennis or not. Just like it or don’t, whatever. The world keeps turning either way. But leftism requires continual display; it’s a non-stop performance. You must always be letting people know how left (and therefore righteous) you are. And so a disinterest in tennis has to be given some significance, something that elevates mere disinterest into political insight and personal status. You have to fret about patriotism, competitiveness and “privilege,” or pretend to anyway. Not liking tennis (or boat races, or football, or whatever) has to signal that you’re above such things.
And so, ironically, not liking competitive sports has to be signalled in a rather competitive way. Credentials must be shown. And then, just to complicate matters, Laurie misjudges the crowd and has to backpedal on her signalling, disavowing the things she so carefully implied moments earlier – due to her readers’ “vicious” “barrage of hate,” i.e., disagreement and a little mocking. For someone who continually tells us how daring and radical she is, Laurie seems awfully concerned with what her peers think.
Met a left-leaner at the weekend. Nice girl, Jewish, protests at everything (though never finds time to raise her voice against socialist wastefulness and hypocrisy, but so it goes) though she seemed troubled that some of the people she associates with might not like the Jews. Israel and its reportedly terrible ways might be the cause, but I think she was slightly unnerved by the idea that her leftie mates aren’t actually nice people who find it a tad easy to dislike others for the flimsiest of reasons.
I think the girl in question is beginning to question her allegiance to groups and causes that actively resent other people. It’s one thing to say you want everyone to be equal and free and then quite another to do liberating things like abuse the helpless and threaten those who don’t immediately share your liberating world view. It’s only a question of time before your progressive friends look round for a new hate target and cast their baleful glare your way next…
My God, these people are funny. Time is heavy on their hands, yes?
Speaking of disdain for popular sports, I was reminded of Terry Eagleton’s bizarre piece on football, the popularity of which is apparently “a way to distract the populace from political injustice.” The World Cup, we learn, is “a setback to any radical change.” Yes, football must be why the working man still hasn’t recognised radical socialism as the glorious thing it is. And note the condescending sneer at people who like the sport. He, you see, is smarter than them and he wants you to be clear on that. Because he’s so egalitarian.
But leftism requires continual display; it’s a non-stop performance.
When you get right down to it, this is probably why I’m a conservative: I’m lazy. I know, you’d think that would make me a socialist — these people seem to have nothing but time on their hands, and all the accoutrements with which to pleasantly wile away the hours (a two year old MacBook, even one “covered with revolutionary stickers,” is way better than the piece of crap I’m using now because I can’t afford a better one). But the tradeoff for all that state-subsidized bliss is having to police one’s every thought and attitude, and damn it, I just can’t muster up any strong feelings about tennis one way or the other. Or “football” (English version). Or reality tv or trainers or fast food or any of the zillion other things leftism requires one to care about. I just want to be able to kick back and watch the tube, read the internet, or take a walk around the block without having to write an Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 140 laborious characters at a time.
My apathy has doomed me to a life of conservatism.
Severian,
But the trade-off for all that state-subsidized bliss is having to police one’s every thought and attitude,
Ah, but you also get to police other people’s every thought and attitude too. Think of all the people you could scold. For some, that’s more than enough compensation. It’s also why leftwing in-fighting can get so heated and competitive. And quite surreal. Or positively bonkers. It’s all about social positioning and jostling for place in a hierarchy of po-faced piety. They’re basically playing Gotcha! It’s like shouting, “You said ‘poo,’ I’m telling!” – but with intellectual pretensions.
Here’s another thing: again, not to try to one-up little Laurie in the competitive grievance stakes, but my Macbook is six years old and is still my primary machine at home. Unlike Laurie, I am a professional software engineer and I use it to do actual, computationally-intensive work. Unless she’s busy compositing video from performances by Marylou Ogreburg and the People’s Bread and Marmite Street Dance Theatre Workshop then I submit she doesn’t actually need a new computer and is just one of the sheeple who have bought into the planned obsolescence culture that the multinationals use to keep us endlessly hitting the feed bar in our Skinner boxes. Or some such.
“seriously considering trying to write some kind of guide to doing direct action with kids in tow”
..is the one that evoked the purest sensations of nausea. I thought this might not be entirely serious, but her follow-up tweet suggests that it was.
Ms Holding’s twitter-profile statement says “Aspiring to be intersectional but don’t like the calling out thing so much”. I had to look up this use of “intersectional” – being the privileged know-nothing that I am – and I wonder whether this page (which contains a whole world of agonies of it’s own) may be close to the meaning she has in mind. An excerpt:
“If someone suggests that you’re doing something racist, ableist, etc., you will tend to react defensively. That’s OK and natural! Take a deep breath, check your privilege, step away from the keyboard if you need to, then apologise and figure out how not to do it again”
Wait a minute…I thought soccer was a communist sport. Re James Taranto in the WSJ several years ago:
While I certainly sympathize with your attitude toward this “sport” implicit in the name you give it, I think the appropriate disdain can only be shown by calling it what it really is: communist football. Consider:
No one understands the rules.
Workers are prohibited from using the tools that would let them be more productive (hands).
From time to time petty bureaucrats (officials) interfere with play in such a way as to limit production.
Players, coaches, officials and fans are all fully involved (employed) and yet output is miniscule.
Any production is met by celebration all out of proportion to its objective value.
Followers are slavishly (religiously?) devoted to the system and their own brand of it and resort to violence at any criticism of either.
http://causeofliberty.wordpress.com/2005/08/25/is-soccer-a-communist-sport/
Severian
Penny has a trust fund… So it’s not all state subsidised bliss, it’s the pernicious effect of a generous parental welfare state.
Devil makes work for trust fundees.
Think of all the people you could scold. For some, that’s more than enough compensation.
Zealotry is always its own reward.
Henry, that Geek Feminism Wikia is digital ipecac.
I’ll be sending you the bill for my brain-reaming.
People shouldn’t have to choose between pointless work and destitution.
Who pays anyone to do ‘pointless’ work (except maybe the government)? What she means is ‘I shouldn’t have to do jobs I don’t like’.
It’s one big ‘waah’.
Alex,
What she means is ‘I shouldn’t have to do jobs I don’t like’. It’s one big ‘waah’.
It does have an air of adolescent pouting. And to be clear, Laurie and co weren’t discussing people unable to work; they were talking about able-bodied people who believe they shouldn’t support themselves because they’re such “freethinkers.” It’s worth noting that many of the people who espouse this view are former students who’ve discovered, belatedly, that their chosen degrees, often politicised degrees, have little commercial value and therefore find themselves obliged to consider less elevated employment. Work they consider beneath them. Hence the disaffection with even the concept of supporting themselves.
And as we saw recently, the people making these pronouncements usually assume that other people should be forced to work longer (or themselves go without) to pay for the proponent’s leisure, food, housing, education, healthcare, etc. As illustrated in the link above, Godfrey Moase and his supporters envision a society in which an undefined but apparently unlimited proportion of one’s earnings (and therefore one’s freedom) will be expropriated by the state in order to keep in comfort people who choose not to support themselves – say, on grounds that they consider themselves “artists and musicians.” Or “theorists,” a fashionable euphemism for generic, rather credulous Marxist poseurs.
After all, it’s hard to let the world know just how radical you are when you’re busy earning a living like a bourgeois nobody. Despite the standard guff about “social justice,” the relationship they want with other people isn’t altruistic or utopian; it’s selfish and parasitic.
Penny has a trust fund.
Ahh, a Trust Fund Trotsky! Those are the best kind. Though… aren’t they the only kind? None of the great people’s champions ever worked a day in their lives, so far as I know. Engels actually owned a factory, for Pete’s sake.
Which is why I always tell my liberal friends, “I take socialism exactly as seriously as you do.”
“[…] We rode in silence, breathing deeply, trying to fill ourselves with the free air we wouldn’t breathe again for a very long time. And there were those bayonets too – swaying hypnotically, menacingly before our eyes like cobras in some nightmare, ready to sink their fangs into our throats.
But at that moment I seemed to wake up – the memory of my fallen comrades, executed by the firing squads of La Cabana, came into my mind. I thought about Julio and his scorn for life as he defended his belief in freedom and patriotism; I thought about all those men who marched to the firing squads with a smile on their lips; I thought about the integrity of those martyrs who had died shouting, “Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Christ the King! Down with Communism!” And I was ashamed to feel so frightened. I realized that the only way to honor the memory of those heroes was to behave with their firmness and integrity. My heart rose up to God, and I fervently prayed for Him to help me stand up to this brutality, and do what I had to do. I felt that God heard my prayer.”
“I would always act according to my own set of values, because reprisals would be more bearable than the reproaches and censures of my own conscience.
Every morning at sunrise La Cabana awoke to the same question –
“Who will they shoot today?“‘
– Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of life in Castro’s Gulags
Eh, but what would an anti-revolutionary, bourgeois enemy of “the people” like that know about real agonies? He was clearly suffering from some kind of capitalist psyops-induced false consciousness.
“None of the great people’s champions ever worked a day in their lives, so far as I know. Engels actually owned a factory, for Pete’s sake.”
While Engels does lose streetcred for possibly doing something so bourgeois as earning money, he did make up for it with the devout bellyfeel with which he advocated wiping out vast swathes of those whose ethnic background rendered them suspected un-re-educatedable persons.
Still, Marx had Engels beat. Having courageously defied his own mother’s suggestion (psy-ops?) that he might not have to borrow/guilt/coerce money from her and others so often if he’d only spend more time trying to earn capital rather than writing about it, he managed to make it through his adult life hardly ever having earned an honest dime, or paid back a debt. Even if it meant selling the silver (inherited or bought with borrowed cash, presumably), he made sure he was always able to pay his servants without ever being enslaved by crass and exploitative capitalism.