“A disorientated and bleeding teenager on the streets of London. A gang pretend to help him, and then mug him.”

Captures the ethos, I think.

Meanwhile, our pocket-size revolutionary Laurie Penny – who of course has “no problem with principled, thought-through political ‘violence’” – is telling her readers: “Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.” Doubtless Laurie will soon tell us exactly what those politics are and how closely they match her own. She is, after all, keen to see the emergence of a “radical youth movement” – “a movement not just for reform but for revolution” – one that “requires direct action” and “upsetting… our parents, our future employers… and quite possibly the police.” Ms Penny also thinks that spitting on women she doesn’t know is pretty rad too.

Elsewhere, while Mothercare burned to the ground and female fire-fighters were dragged from their vehicles and punched insensible, a number of leftist anti-cuts groups announced their “solidarity” with the thugs, thieves and predators. “London,” we learn, “is the world’s biggest Black Bloc.” While student “activist,” chronic liar and Independent blogger Jody McIntyre was busy using his new media profile to urge further rioting and arson. No doubt the Indie, the Guardian and the New Statesman will be swollen with pride at the doings of their latest protégé. But remember, people. As the Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal told us recently, setting fire to occupied buildings – resulting in this – isn’t “real” violence. Not when compared to “hypocritical language.”

Update, via the comments:

Janet Daley ponders media hegemonies:

It was a broadcasters’ event some years ago. I had been invited to speak on a favourite subject: the BBC hegemony in broadcast news and the risk that its own package of tendentious assumptions – that Euroscepticism was a lunatic fringe irrelevance, that anyone who expressed concern about immigration was a bigot, etc – was going unchallenged in the mass media. After I had said my piece, a BBC producer in the audience asked whether, since I was so concerned about the dangers of large media organisations, I did not have the same objection to the existence of the “Murdoch empire.”

“No-o-o,” I replied patiently, I did not have the same objection. If I did not wish to support Mr Murdoch’s enterprises I could refrain from buying his newspapers or subscribing to his television service – and no one could threaten me with arrest and imprisonment for so doing. This was, I suggested, a rather significant difference between the two media corporations.

Tim Blair shows us why,

It’s always a good thing when politicians become involved in the workings of the free press.

And Heresy Corner basks in the radiance of Sunny Hundal, a titan among men:

The Liberal Conspiracy supremo is agonising – agonising, I tell you – over his tactics. Should he mobilise his online army and – gulp – declare a boycott of the Sun? People have been urging such a decisive course of action. “Several readers,” he notes, “keep asking when the boycott of the Sun newspaper or the whole of News International will take place.” But like any good general, Sunny knows that timing is everything: “Look, I’m not fan of the Sun newspaper by any stretch of the imagination, but this isn’t going to happen any time soon. If we do strike, it would have to be at the right time. That isn’t to say a group of us haven’t discussed this already. The problem is, for a boycott to work would require a big scandal that motivates lots of people outside the usual suspects.”

Because if a handful of people who don’t buy the Sun anyway declare that henceforward they’re not going to buy the Sun, the effect on News International’s global domination might be less than catastrophic, however psychologically satisfying.

Regular readers will be familiar with Mr Hundal, who in 2009 announced his “hard-line stance on environmental issues” along with his support for Plane Stupid, an activist group who “occupy” airport runways, stranding thousands of passengers, and who denounce air travel as “mostly unnecessary.” “Honestly,” said Mr Hundal, “I love these guys.” Though perhaps not as much as he loved flying halfway around the planet, twice, to India then California, weeks before declaring his eco-radical credentials. Readers may also recall Sunny’s admiration  for John Pilger, whom he hailed as a “voice of conscience” for the left. Albeit one who described American and Australian troops as “legitimate targets” and who predicted a NeoCon attack on China “within a decade.”

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Jonathan Tobin on Wisconsin, double standards and the New York Times.

The portrayal of the unions and their Democratic Party allies, who have attempted not so much to defeat the Republican program but to prevent the legislature from even meeting to vote, as the progressive movement that represents the will of the people is absurd. […] Contrary to the Times, the governor of Wisconsin and the Republicans in the legislature there are not the moral equivalent of Tunisian or Egyptian autocrats. They were voted into office by the people and what they are doing is exactly what they promised the electorate they would do once they gained office. It is the unions and the Democrats who are the reactionary defenders of an untenable and frankly undemocratic status quo, not the Republicans who advocate change.

Heresy Corner on the statist ‘radicalism’ of UK Uncut.

In many English villages there was a tradition known as “rough music.” If a resident had offended against the suffocating norms of rural life – typically a local woman who had begun an irregular sexual liaison – the neighbours would gather night after night under her window banging pots and pans. People would blow horns and shout insults. Effigies of the guilty parties would be paraded through the streets and then burnt. Eventually they would be forced to leave. Rough music was anarchic, democratic (or at least demotic), legally dubious and, at least in appearance, had the spontaneity and anti-authoritarianism of a popular revolt. But the message was resolutely reactionary and conformist.

UK Uncut’s demonstrators share rough music’s self-righteousness and have equally “conservative” aims – shoring up a threatened social model based on high state spending in which the highest expression of morality consists in handing over your money to the government… By choosing tax-avoidance as its Big Issue, the group expresses an abiding and paradoxical attachment to the conventional political institutions, a belief that if the state is no longer central then at least it should be, that its irrelevance is something to be regretted, because the best way to restore balance to politics and to society is to make sure that politicians get More Of Our Money.

And Guido Fawkes has a question for Alan Rusbridger.

What Guido and many confused Guardian readers would like to know is how the use of these opaque investment vehicles is compatible with the public positions taken by the [Guardian Media Group] newspapers and even members of the board. Will Hutton for example is a former editor of the Observer who sits alongside Alan Rusbridger on the board of the Scott Trust Foundation. Is Hutton, a noted campaigner against hedge funds, comfortable with GMG having hundreds of millions in assets both offshore and invested in hedge funds? Are the perennially loss making Guardian newspaper’s columnists like Polly Toynbee happy to have their six-figure salaries paid out of the profits of hedge fund raids on the currencies of emerging market countries? Isn’t it about time the Guardian’s senior executives explained openly and honestly to its readers how it really survives despite losing money every year?

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Over the past few months I have become, and remain, deeply embedded in the student movement in the UK and Europe. Many of the young people who feature in the piece – on whose activities I’ve been keeping meticulous notes, and who are of a similar age and political attitude to myself – have since become as close to personal friends as observational subjects ever can be… This has stretched my objectivity to its limits. I have had to work and rework the article to make sure I was constructing an accurate portrait.

So says Laurie Penny, reporting from “the front line of student activism.”

Readers familiar with Ms Penny’s brand of activist journalism – in the pages of the Guardian, New Statesman and the communist Morning Star – may find her use of the words “accurate” and “objectivity” inadvertently amusing. This is the same Laurie Penny who tells us that, while “not everyone who displays an England flag is a fascist,” football is nonetheless “commodified nationalism” played by “misogynist jocks” indulging in “organised sadism.” The World Cup is apparently not about football at all, but “only and always about men.” It’s a “month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia,” one that “violently excludes more than half the people.”

Like so much in Laurie’s world, it just does, okay?

Writing for Red Pepper, Ms Penny tells us that, “capitalism is built on the docile bodies of women” and that women are reduced to “reproductive labourers whose physical and sexual autonomy is relentlessly policed.” The same article rails against “US state governments [that] compete to think up ever more cruel and unusual ways to punish women for sexual self-determination.” 

It is, I think, fair to say that Laurie Penny enjoys railing against things, generally things that aren’t entirely obvious but which are framed as both terrible and somehow self-evident. A typical Laurie Penny article is long on assertion, short on facts and coherent argument, and invariably written in the highest possible gear. She rails against the Conservative Party (“hordes of drooling poshos”) and its “brutally intolerant moral agenda.” The details of this brutally intolerant agenda are, alas, somewhat vague. She rails against “the bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control,” the particulars of which also remain unspecified and mysterious. She rails against a “heteronormative patriarchy that oppresses all of us.” (What, you didn’t know?) She rails against “brutal repression” by an impending police state that no-one else can see, and she rails against protestors “not being heard,” as if being heard must entail being agreed with and obeyed. Ours, she says, is a world “on fire.”

When not railing against a heteronormative police state that’s brutal, intolerant and also on fire, Ms Penny likes to share with us an extensive menu of personal miseries, along with other aspects of her fascinating self:  

It’s getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It’s getting harder to stay angry… That terrifies me more than anything… The centre-right have taken back my country… Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world’s only superpower.

“I need to do it.” Kim Rugg remakes newspapers. Via.