Don’t Touch Their Biscuits
Following the recent scolding by her crab-bucket comrades, Laurie Penny wishes to reassert her leftist credentials:
All very pious. Though it seems to me those credentials were amply visible immediately after the rioting and thuggery at UC Berkeley, covered here, when Laurie was letting her followers know just how brave she is for mixing with conservatives and college Republicans, i.e., the people under attack, who are apparently “vicious and vengeful.”
Well. Here’s an interview with Kiara Robles, one of the “far right” women surrounded and assaulted, repeatedly, by the righteously left-leaning Berkeley ‘protestors’. It seems that merely wearing a hat with the words “Make Bitcoin Great Again” is enough to make you a “Nazi,” a “fascist,” and therefore a target of physical abuse. And here’s an interview with another woman – sorry, “Nazi” – who was repeatedly assaulted at UC Berkeley, along with her husband, who was severely beaten with metal bars.
These ladies, then, are some of the people of whom Laurie Penny is, and I quote, “fucking terrified.”
Update:
Meet Yvette Felarca, a middle school teacher and one of the organisers of the Berkeley rioting. “The left has been far too timid for far too long,” says she.
Update 2:
Here’s Yvette Felarca and her goons getting ‘hands-on’ in Sacramento. And again, watch the police.
Apropos the comment about “The Life of Brian” and how little things change. Many years ago I was taken for a drink to a local watering hole by the University by a fellow with wide contacts amongst the “revolutionary” left but who was not an actual member of any of the groups. For amusement, he pointed out that the pub, about half full at the time, contained at least 7 groupings, all drinking and steadfastly ignoring one another. There were the Stalinists, about 3, the Trotskyites (2), Marxist-Leninist (3), the Marxist-Lenist Maoist version (5, the largest), the Socialist workers Party (Marxist-Leninist) (3), and a Vietnamese faction of the Maoists (2) and a solitary Pol-Potist. Apparently several other “groups” of 2 or 3 existed (including I think a Titoist and a NORK fancier) but weren’t there. They all drank at the same pub because that’s where they started going to as a member of one or other faction, and as they split, merged, re-split and perenially feuded they couldn’t agree that any of them should change locals. So they instead studiously ignored each other with just the odd sneering sideways look and mutters of “splitters”.
Just for the record, 95% male.
In reference to DEFCON, it can be called the POPCON or “Populism Condition” of a society:
Heh. Not entirely implausible.
It reminded me of the “Occupy theoretician” David Graeber, who seemed to imagine that the lumpen masses would thrill to a vanguard of middle-class poseurs “destabilising the country” with a “vision of revolution inspired by anarchism.” Because the one thing that nice Mrs Wilson down the road can’t wait for is a communist coup, economic ruin and lots of burning cars in the street outside.
“and a solitary Pol-Potist”
Ah, so that’s what they mean by “socialist unity”.
In reference to DEFCON, it can be called the POPCON or “Populism Condition” of a society:
It’s easy to laugh, and I suppose one has to, but it’s dismaying just how many cossetted middle-class leftists, including quite a few statusful academics, find the prospect of mob thuggery titillating. Provided it’s being inflicted on someone else, of course.
Signs. POPulism COndition of RevolutioN. POPCORN. c.f. Julia
Laurie was letting her followers know just how brave she is for mixing with conservatives and college Republicans, i.e., the people under attack, who are apparently “vicious and vengeful.”
Right there we see the reason Laurie decides to mingle with the enemy in the first place: it’s deliciously dangerous to hob-nob with Fascists, not unlike Sean Penn hanging with Chávez or Castro, a way for the Truly Badass to count coup and escape undamaged.
Wouldn’t it be funny if she kept taking these daring forays into the enemy camp and then is forced to rethink her entire worldview because she realized from her own experience how WRONG she is?
She did, after all, interview Milo once and found him to be highly engaging and fun.
Her tweet contains further intimations of that very self-awareness. I’m almost encouraged: a pose can either become more than a pose or it will be eventually shed when reality demands it.
it’s dismaying just how many cossetted middle-class leftists including quite a few statusful academics, find the prospect of mob thuggery titillating.
While at Cornell I was gob-smacked to see how often both grad students and teachers would brighten considerably when talking about the people rising up and up-ending the system.
And this was in the 1990s yet.
Oh, and one chap said, again quite seriously, that “if you go drinking with someone U R 1 of them (invariably).”
If, like me, you have ever pondered the baffling and seemingly inexplicable popularity of Miss Penny’s output, I think the abuse she has received on Twitter recently may well have provided the key.
Quite simply, we may be the only people who have actually read what she has written – and anyone who professes to be a fan hasn’t.
If true, it would seem to explain quite a lot.
She has, after all, twice already interviewed Stephen ‘Tommy Robinson’ Lennon – once at a Luton pub over dinner – and she has also sat down for coffee with Mike Buchanan of Justice for Men and Boys’ fame – a Men’s Rights Activist.
Where were the hysterical accusations of being a traitor, a collaborator and a supporter of the enemy then? I don’t recall any.
But the icing on the cake is surely that only just last year she wrote a piece called I’m With The Banned, which was an interview with Milo Yiannopoulos whom she describes in the piece as “a charming devil and one of the worst people I know.” In the same article she confesses that she and Yiannopoulos had met previously when they were:
guests on opposing sides of a panel show whose topic I don’t remember and can’t be bothered to look up [A professional to the last as ever] Afterwards we got hammered in the green room and ran around the BBC talking about boys. It was fun.
Seriously, if I know this, how is it that they – by which I mean her supposed fans – don’t?
Could it be that Penny is just a name they associate with Correct-Think and nothing more? That as far as they are concerned, what she actually writes is a matter of utter indifference to them – that it is enough for them to know that she has the right politics?
Full points. If I was the proprietor, I’d be sliding a slice of cake across the bar.
Not that I’m criticizing. Nope. Not I.
Which brings to mind this: The Left Hates You, Act Accordingly
Being force fed crow is never pleasant. However, non-progressives treat crow as feedback: what did we miss; how do we need to change; which of our ideas need rethinking.
In contrast, since progressives are right because they have progressive ideas which are true and good because progressives hold them, adjustment is impossible.
Which means their response to a plate of stewed crow is lying, burning buildings, and beatings. They have either learned nothing from Maos cultural revolution, or learned far too much.
Useful idiots, dicentra, are called idiots for a reason.
Now that we’ve seen Laurie experience the “an apostate is given one chance to repent” treatment, I’m wondering what happens if one day it comes out that she slept with one of us others.
In the Religion of Progress is it also the rule that a Progressive man may bed a (willing or unwilling) unbeliever women, but for a Progressive woman such dalliances spell death?
All that aside do you know what’s truly depressing about 1979’s Life of Brian? Arguably not a single satirical facet is either antiquated or else irrelevant in 2017….
I fear fewer people understand how Romanes eunt domus is wrong these days.
While at Cornell I was gob-smacked to see how often both grad students and teachers would brighten considerably when talking about the people rising up and up-ending the system.
And this was in the 1990s yet.
20 years ago, in the midst of working out butts off in 50-60 hour work weeks, our development staff of white, black, Asian Americans, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese (from Taiwan and Hong Kong), Hungarians, and one Russian were marched off to spend three hours in a not-quite-but-kinda-close Jane Elliott style diversity training class taught by two black ladies and a black gentlemen (the latter just passed out and collected the materials, said nothing). We were fed BS urban legends to “teach” us how our thinking was bad. My eye rolling or something, possibly my obvious discomfort with having to be “educated” with such lies, got me the attention of one of the instructors who at the end of the class lectured me as all my coworkers walked past. Again, this was 20 years ago. Things were out of control way back then. I related this story to my doctor saying things are spinning out of control. He suggested it was nothing to be concerned about. These things get resolved on their own, he said. Or something to that effect. Seems nobody cared to resolve these things over the last 20 years, so it looks like it’s up to Donald Trump to fix it.
BTW, heard that Casey Anthony has come out of seclusion to protest outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. And they said the Circus was dead.
OK, did I do that or TomJ?
Wow. I am so glad I wasn’t the one to goon up html.
The proprietor gets completely lethal about that.
(Not that I’m an informer or anything, but my money is on Squires.)
Nailed it.
I’m blaming Squires for all those slanty characters.
The thing about being forced into company with loads of left wing folk is that one quickly learns their patois. Hell, back in the 70s I ingratiated myself with a cute commie girl (Literally. She was a member of the RCP, who had split from the CPUSA) by muttering “oppression” under my breath as I passed behind her station on the manufacturing line one day. We dated a bit, but nothing came of it except the education I got from attending an RCP meeting in Berkeley one night. (She eventually quit work in favor of being a professional blackjack player. I Am Not Making This Up.)
I find it’s ludicrously easy to sit, listen, converse, and manipulate the conversation in any direction I want. They’re just so damn eager to explain everything, to theorize, to blame, to complain. You can’t shut them up.
Sam Duncan | February 06, 2017 at 13:17
Compare Lord Carey with Orwell in “Notes on Nationalism”:
“…if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.”
Hey David! We’re way the heck over the monthly ration for italics.
(Even though, as you know, the ration’s been raised from 25 grams to 21 grams / month. All Hail Big Brother!)
Shhhh…be vewy vewy quiet. I think the Boss is sleeping. He works very hard for us. He needs his beauty rest.
I love the way far Left-wingers can’t even agree with each other anywhere, anytime. New Zealand, hardly a big country, has had nine officially organised Communist parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communist_parties_in_New_Zealand
Meanwhile the Right can still be quite bitter about the split between rugby league and rugby union. Which was in 1895.
And, yeah, I was just trying to kill those blessed italics.
A handy pocket guide:
http://www.returnofkings.com/113715/7-reasons-to-never-date-a-girl-who-attends-a-protest
[ Rubs eyes, reaches for coffee, surveys avalanche of italics. ]
I see you’ve all been busy, then.
[ Slides generous slice of Battenberg to Chester Draws, who fathomed how to stop it. ]
Here’s Yvette Felarca, a middle school teacher, and one of the Berkeley ‘antifa’ organisers, sharing her thoughts.
Apparently, and seemingly self-evidently, Milo is a “white supremacist… a fascist… trying to recruit more fascists.” And so Ms Felarca and her comrades are prepared to do “whatever it takes” to “shut down” not only his events but anything they don’t agree with. “The left has been far too timid for far too long,” she says. “We have a right to defend ourselves.” Even against camp mockery. The thuggery at Berkeley, we’re told, will be “a model for the future.” And while promising to impose her will via more mob violence, Ms Felarca insists that “responsibility” for “anything that happened” at Berkeley – including, presumably, the beatings of women by masked sociopaths – lies with Berkeley’s chancellor.
She says this while smiling.
Ms Felarca has a history of far-left “activism” and violent altercation.
She says this while smiling.
That’s one creepy bitch.
For amusement, he pointed out that the pub, about half full at the time, contained at least 7 groupings
Meanwhile, the *actual* proletariat was slogging its guts out brewing the beer, delivering it, serving it to them or cleaning out the rollups from their ashtrays.
That’s one creepy bitch.
The vanity and dishonesty are hard to miss, especially on the issue of responsibility, as she casually exonerates the people actually choosing to beat random women with metal bars. It’s the ‘baby-don’t-make-me-hit-you’ manoeuvre. My impression is that the only time Ms Felarca is truthful is when she promises more mob violence. The attendant feeling of power is evidently something she enjoys.
This isn’t really politics. It’s more like a personality disorder clutching an excuse.
Here’s Yvette Felarca, a middle school teacher, and one of the Berkeley ‘antifa’ organisers, sharing her thoughts.
Obviously she’s clearly apt and to be considered a major influence—She’s got the correct glasses, or at least eyeglass frames . . .
(Even though, as you know, the ration’s been raised from 25 grams to 21 grams / month. All Hail Big Brother!)
Normally for this sort of work I charge $125,000 for the group, but just for readers of David’s blog I offer a 60% discount, cutting all the way down to only charge $750,000 per person, ’cause after all, it’s only fair, I gotta make a living too . . .
That’s one creepy bitch.
I read The Black Book of Communism shortly after its publication. Throughout, I could not fathom what kind of human being could so easily subject others to such atrocities.
Not the soldiers actually herding people onto trains or executing prisoners, mind you, but the faceless apparatchiks signing off on the orders.
What kind of monster could so blithely condemn dozens, hundreds, and thousands of innocent fellow citizens to certain starvation and death, merely to advance a cause?
To cut to the chase, now I know. They’re among us today.
And it’s staggering to think that the same thing could happen here if people like Felarca ever seized the levers of power.
“clearly apt”
Heh. Apt Pupil
Watch this. An American kid of Chinese extraction hijacks Shia LaBeouf’s ‘He will not divide us’ camera to lay into PC culture and Liberals. His mates are black, latino, and mixed race.
It’s quite beautiful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGWBQTvjt7s
It’s quite beautiful.
I did like the line, “We are the ‘Nazis’.”
I doubt this news will confound anyone’s expectations:
Insert gag of choice.
Of course Laurie was attacked by her fellow travelers, she could have brought the whole thing crashing down. The left needs the right to appear cartoonishly evil. What if she spent some time speaking to conservatives and discovered that they, astonishingly, were not jackbooted nazi thugs? Could anything be more devastating to the left? It would render their entire enterprise pointless, and reveal them to be the fascist thugs. Can’t have that.
An overwhelming majority of violent “Antifascist” protesters still live with their mom, according to a new study. Research found that 92% of those suspected of violent crimes at Left-leaning demonstrations still share their home with their parents.
It certainly makes sense, as violent protesting and maintaining a level of employment to support oneself financially are mutually exclusive behaviors.
I saw a partial list of those arrested in Washington, DC during the inauguration riots. The vast majority were mid-late 20’s. Well past reasonable leaving-the-nest age.
It certainly makes sense, as violent protesting and maintaining a level of employment to support oneself financially are mutually exclusive behaviors.
And given that the wannabe revolutionaries tend to be middle-class and tend to mouth the same idiocies, as if regurgitating lecture notes, I suspect there’s a sizeable overlap with people who pissed away their parents money, or taxpayers’ money, on joke degrees in Angry Studies, which encouraged lots of pretentious resentment but left them close to unemployable. Presumably, this personal failure is then rationalised as the fault of capitalism or whatever. Rather than it being the obvious consequence of their own poor choices, their own vanities.
Left out of the description, of the 92% of apron-stringers, is the percentage that are white. I do not know the breakdown, but I would suspect that the number of these 20 somethings, that are white, is high. No surprise, as they have spent their formative years being told that they’re futures are bleak, necessarily, to atone for the sin of their skin color.
Presumably, this personal failure is then rationalised as the fault of capitalism or whatever.
And of course what is not going to help is the actual situations of, err, the ongoing-actual-for-good-reasons of capitalism . . . and then what is certainly also not going to help is all of the quite definite additional instances of . . . the obvious consequence of their own poor choices, their own vanities.
Unfortunately, there will always be a hipster born every minute, that annoying reality is never going away . . .
First-year student Malini Ramaiyer on what she saw at Berkeley:
I suppose we’re all ‘Nazis’ now.
I quite like this:
Via.
Lindsey Dearnley has some thoughts about Laurie’s brand of feminism.
I quite like this
All ideologies are a reflection of the psychology of their founders, and shape the psychology of the true believer in that image.
It’s no coincidence that Amin al-Husseini made the cover of Vienna Illustrated back in ’44, and that modern “student union” and “antifa” types happily march side by side in solidarity with the kind of grand jackasses who still consider the prick respectable.
The deceptive mentality is the deceptive mentality is the deceptive mentality.
Apologies for the late slantiness. A down-payment on an indulgence should arrive in the collection box shortly.
Lindsey Dearnley has some thoughts about Laurie’s brand of feminism.
There is, I think, some truth there.
Lindsey Dearnley has some thoughts about Laurie’s brand of feminism.
As I’ve said before, Laurie’s lifestyle advice, which is ultimately what it is, is unlikely to be rewarding, and may well prove to be ruinous, especially if embraced by women from backgrounds more modest than Laurie’s. The things that she would have her readers disdain and abandon, as both a “systemic lie” and an affront to radicalism, those “small, ugly ambitions,” are in fact cultural resources, assets for living. Assets that the state can never replace. And yet Laurie tells us, repeatedly and with an air of great earnestness, that “love needs to be freed from the confines of the traditional, monogamous, nuclear family.” Anything less is oppressive, an affront to both womanhood and radicalism, says she. Because the repeated swapping of multiple, transient partners, even on into middle age, is never, ever a recipe for insecurity and neurosis. It’s the only way to be “free,” apparently. At least until someone gets pregnant and the arguments begin.
According to Laurie, the “vanishing amount of security offered by coupledom” is outweighed by a million oppressions, like being mutually considerate and remembering birthdays, all of which constitute an intolerable loss of “personal autonomy.” Such is her disdain, she likes the idea of “women reject[ing] marriage and partnership en masse” and wishes to see the institutions of marriage and family “dismantled” in favour of atomised living and single mothers, which necessarily entails ever-more widespread dependency on the state – or as she puts it, “society doing more to support women’s choices.”
According to Laurie, the participants in a marriage or any remotely conventional coupling can never be “true equals.” And so the gist of her counsel seems to be that it’s wrong and oppressive for a woman to be emotionally or financially dependent on a man who cares for her, for richer and poorer, ‘til death, even if he is equally dependent, financially and emotionally, on her. But for women, and by extension any fatherless children, to be utterly and existentially dependent on the state, which doesn’t and cannot care, this is somehow morally right and an act of “liberation.”
And Laurie’s own private education, fashionable career and globe-trotting adventures would have been much less likely without the bourgeois values and comfortable upbringing that she publicly disdains and urges others to abandon. In fact, if you wanted to leave lots of young women frustrated and resentful, dependent and isolated, Laurie’s worldview would be a pretty good way to achieve it. But of course Laurie’s status and career, and that of other self-imagined revolutionaries of the left, depend on the resentment and disaffection of others, and on their credulity. It’s what they feed on. Our supposedly radical gurus have little to gain from successful, functional people with a grip on their own lives. And they have no incentive to offer advice that would result in more functionality and success.
In a sense, people like Laurie are cultural vandals. One might call them parasites.
According to Laurie, the participants in a marriage or any remotely conventional coupling can never be “true equals.” And so the gist of her counsel seems to be that it’s wrong and oppressive for a woman to be emotionally or financially dependent on a man who cares for her, for richer and poorer, ‘til death, even if he is equally dependent, financially and emotionally, on her. But for women, and by extension any fatherless children, to be utterly and existentially dependent on the state, which doesn’t and cannot care, this is somehow morally right and an act of “liberation.”
All. Of. That.
I come for the posts but I stay for the comments. 🙂
Move over, Laurie! Carrie Jenkins is the hot new academic in town making the philosophical case for polyamory, complete with breathless media coverage. Doubtless, the only thing preventing the ideal from going mainstream before now was its lack of a solid theoretical foundation. I mean, what can’t be improved by academic theorizing?
Of course, this follows on the heels of the equally breathless coverage devoted last fall to Emily Witt and her book about dismantling oppressive sexual norms, something something “the future of sex is orgy domes”, etc.
Move over, Laurie! Carrie Jenkins is the hot new academic in town making the philosophical case for polyamory, complete with breathless media coverage.
Things can often be thrilling in the abstract, as grandiose ideals, especially when espoused by people with the comforts of tenure and the social and material resources of middle-class life. But as Tim Newman and others have pointed out, the everyday practicalities of such things – especially for people with no such resources – can be rather more squalid and disappointing. And more so with age. I don’t much care how other people arrange their romantic lives, but it seems to me that, as with Laurie’s sermonising, the practical reality entails even larger, and less sustainable, dependency on the state – by which, I mean the coerced forbearance of others. The state will pay your rent as an abandoned single mother, and feed your fatherless children, and do some of the things, albeit badly, that a committed partner would do, but without the love.
And then, still poor, you get old and lonely.
There’s an interesting book called The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, by Michael Booth, a British expat married to a Danish woman and living in Denmark. This section, in which he discusses political philosophy with a couple of Swedish officials, seems relevant:
Burke’s “little platoons” versus Rousseau’s “social contract” — still a live issue after all these centuries.
This section, in which he discusses political philosophy with a couple of Swedish officials, seems relevant
I imagine Laurie would approve. But I refer you to last two sentences of my previous comment. And to quote the great philosopher Charlie Chan, “Theory, like mist on eyeglasses, obscure facts.”
By the way, if anyone’s still wondering how students like those at Berkeley arrive at their dogmatic tribalism and pretensions of victimhood, this may help answer that question.