Today’s Word Is Juxtapose

So can I have her laptop and iPhone?

Anti-capitalist rally in Berlin. Genius. Maybe they can walk the route of the Wall to really ram home what they are proposing.

And remember, this is the would-be communist revolutionary who can’t live without Facebook.

I used to think she was just an over-indulged child with the internet as a plaything. Now I think that’s too generous.

To hell with Penny Red, she’s boringly predictable.
But THIS sounds like a job for…(wait for it)… HERCULES!

Why don’t the tools who want a communist revolution just emigrate to places where it already happened?
Inferior WiFi? A less credulous audience?

“the whole thing crashing down,” the abolition of the conventional family, no-one having to work if they don’t really feel like it, and lots of stuff being, as she puts it, on fire.
Sounds like fun. For a weekend. If you’re 19.
But yeah, this:
“Anti-capitalist rally in Berlin. Genius.”

Because then they wouldn’t be able to be “revolutionaries” anymore. They’d be out of a job.
Ehn, given the track record, more likely they’d be the job.

Penny doesn’t really want to end capitalism.
Like Naomi Klein, she well knows that only the capitalist system can afford to support parasites people like her in the manner they so richly deserve.
Her career is to oppose capitalism but not so effectively that she actually succeeds, which she knows would be a tragedy for her and everyone else.

“@paulmasonnews and I”. FIFH.

Frankly I’m puzzled. Laurie seems to be as dumb as a box of cream donuts, but somehow she apparently still gets paid to try to destroy capitalism, which…pays her to do it. Buh-whuh?

It’s not politics, it’s a cry for help.
Or her chosen therapy?

‘Penny doesn’t really want to end capitalism.
Like Naomi Klein, she well knows that only the capitalist system can afford to support parasites people like her in the manner they so richly deserve’.
This may be a folk myth, but there was apparently a cartoon in the 1970s showing a vendor of ‘Socialist Worker’ outside the gates of a factory. There are a couple of factory workers, and one of them is saying ‘Right, so we’ve formed a Soviet, shot the bosses, and declared workers power. What do we do next?’
The ‘Socialist Worker’ vendor is supposed to be visibly shitting himself.

Penny probably thinks that using the pronoun “me” instead of the correct pronoun “I” makes her sound more working class. In fact it just makes her sound like a mental defective. “Me is doing a talk in Berlin”.
Dozy twat.

Siiiiggghhh. Having a skim through the headlines of the moment, and then spotted;
Opinion:Panama Papers: Why Aren’t There More American Names?
The New Yorker
Um. Why would there be?

Anti-capitalist rally in Berlin. Genius.
Well, we’re talking about someone who, while reminding the world that she’s “a Journalism Fellow at Harvard,” struggled with the thought that printed newspapers tend to have an even number of pages.

It’s on.
Oh no. Will capitalism survive?

David, the Thatcher documentary (which I hadn’t seen) is brilliant.

“Mr Mason is so busy ascribing magical powers to Mrs Thatcher, he overlooks the fact that massive and unprecedented working class support was rather pivotal to her three election victories.’
Ah, but they were deceived by the Prince of Darkness himself, Rupert Murdoch.

Paul Mason: We had seen the film Kes, and chuckled at the poverty of aspiration we were all in the process of leaving behind. Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies: politicised and articulate, wanting only libraries big enough to house the books we had to wait weeks for.
Has Mason really seen Kes?
Both in Barry Hines’ original novel and in the Ken Loach film, Billy Casper is the only character with aspirations- they may be inchoate given his age but they are definitely there, symbolised by his theft and subsequent rearing of the adolescent kestrel. His schoolmates are the ones who will end up “going’ down t’pit”, something which Billy is desperate to avoid. Billy’s teachers could not give a shit; the football match is brilliant comedy, but the telling scene is Billy’s encounter with the careers teacher. The lack of aspiration is all around Billy, because his home life is hideous with an absentee father, a slag of a mother and an ignorant thug of a half-brother. The film portrays working-class life as tragedy- it doesn’t suggest Billy Casper is a one-off. It is only his desire to escape the horror that makes Billy the exception rather than the norm.
I am of the same age as Mason and from the same side of the Pennines; replace “Going down t’pit” with “Goin’ t’work in t’mill/shoe factory/tyre factory or down one of t’few pits left after Wilson and Benn closed the buggers down” and life for a large swathe of the working class was exactly as portrayed in Kes. The towns and cities of the industrial North in the 1960s and 1970s were hard and often violent places. Mason’s trajectory towards university, teaching music and eventually talking and writing specious bollocks about economics began with aspirational and dedicated parents and the teachers at his grammar school (bingo!) who no doubt pushed their talented son* towards university, making sure he did his homework and got those vital ‘O’ and ‘A’-level passes.There would have been others of a similar worldview and they might have been “politicised and articulate” (and more than a fair few of them would have been Tories who belonged to “the Con club”) but they would have been a minority.
*He has a degree in “music and politics” from Sheffield. “Music and politics”- hmmm. But Sheffield is a decent redbrick, so we’ll let that one pass.

Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies: politicised and articulate, wanting only libraries big enough to house the books we had to wait weeks for.
The man’s an incorrigible fantasist, positively delusional. From his dreams of subversively communist computer games and his utopian “slums of hope” to his breathless descriptions of the 2011 London rioters – mostly career criminals with records as long as your arm – as a “massive political demonstration against the capitalist state.” You’d be hard pressed to make Mr Mason sound more unwittingly comical than he already is.

Or a liar.
He doesn’t seem overly concerned with whether what he writes is true or even plausible. Much like Laurie, in fact.

“Music and politics”.
It conjures up a sort of mid-70s Pythonesque vision of a stand-off which would have taken place in the Leigh home of the Mason family in the winter of 1977 when the subject of young Paul’s choice of degree possibly became a bone of contention. Paul Mason (played by Michael Palin), wants to read politics, is obsessed by all manifestations of Leftism and goes into rhapsodies about the beauty and simplicity of Rousseau, the shimmering symmetry of Trotskyism, the modernist clarity of Mao etc., etc. Mason the elder, he of the“…lifetime of trade unionism, workplace discussion and self-education meant he could sight-read music, grapple with serious novels and sit though five hours of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, (played by Graham Chapman, I think) is a gruff no-nonsense fairisle-pullover-and-collarless-shirt clad Northerner who gestures with an unlit pipe whilst spelling out the need for the younger Mason to have a grounding in simple, worthwhile, common-sense stuff such as Schubert and Mussorgsky.
In the end, after almost coming to blows and being harangued by a screeching “Mum” (Terry Jones in drag, naturally), they decide to toss a coin which lands on its edge. There is a stunned silence and the cast do double-takes to the camera, before father Mason utters the punchline:
“Looks like you’re going to Sheffield then, lad”.

Darwin Awards: Early Issue
http://www.newser.com/story/223135/teen-killed-after-strapping-rocket-to-skateboard.html

“let’s get the audiences together to end capitalism!”
That sounds like a line from the “Die Hippie Die” episode of South Park.

“Don’t try this at home.”
The difference between deflagration and detonation. “Some chemical combination”.

The spam filter is being uppity again. If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll shake them free.

@ Hal
That article quotes . . . Conspiracy theories are very, very popular.
Eek. Gasp. The horror, the horror. Oh, the humanity.
Oh, and Think of the children . . .
—A friend who grew up speaking Russian as her first language rather matter of factly confirmed the utter lack of surprise to find Putin very quickly turning up in the data . . . and then three days later there is a very interesting brand new announcement out of Moscow . . .

@Lancastrian: I have not heard that one, I’m going to use it! The saying I hear and use most is “dumb as a box of rocks,” which comes out as “dumazaboxarox” here in the Midwest USA.

Sharp as a . . . .
Not exactly the sharpest lump of sandstone in the knife drawer . . . .

A New Zealand judge, sentencing saome dumb criminals, allegedly said:
“You couldn’t find your own arse using both hands, a torch, and a GPS”.

Swift like fence post.

From Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker.
Oh, that does look like fun . . . . I suppose I should also get around to reading through all of Chandler . . .

Which makes me want to steer Mr Mason around the rougher and more vandalised parts of town so he can suggest these things personally to the tattooed teenagers in question.
I’d watch that show.

I suspect that if our clownish old communist knew something about IQ, heredity and assortative mating, and how these things tend to produce social stratification
Imagine a world in which he does. It’s easy if you try.
jk…actually, I don’t really know the old fool aside from what little I’ve picked up here but I have spent a good bit of time imagining where that line is between the useful idiots and the sociopaths. I’m ill that way. It gets even worse when I think about the dynamics of the interaction twixt sociopaths. Thoughts like this are why I can never retire.

I lived in Berlin where there was still a wall. In fact I lived in East Berlin as a foreigner who could leave.
A few years back I saw a protesting group of old “anti-capitalist” types and a few young suckers. It was near the Brandenburg gate. I pointed out to them was that where they were standing was more-or-less on the location of the swerving wall where you could stand and look at the thing from the western side.
They didn’t quite get it.