chava

Well-known member
I saw this yesterday, it had zero signatures... probably a glitch cos surely the originators must have signed it but it was funny.

She changed her name now. Hahaha. This is just hilarious, best entertainment during the pandemic
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Didn't her friend get beaten by the police to the extent that he was permanently injured though? Seems the same ballpark to me

He did and Nina's understandable trauma around this (and the court cases, media coverage etc) seems to partly be what has lead her down the inadvisable path that she is on.

But the friend who was assaulted by the cops doesn't seem to have followed her down that path afaik:

I'm not making light of any of this - Nina has obviously had a terrible time of it and dealt with things badly and a lot of her former friendships have now ended. And yes she probably has lost some income out of it. And dealt with abuse online.

But she is not a non-person now.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Sure I'm not saying that she is.... I don't know her and I've never met her and I don't really know enough about all this to have much an opinion either way. The one thing I do know is the above though and that is a genuine example of police brutality that is not to be shrugged off as snowflakes moaning about stuff that is trivial compared to that which "real" revolutionaries have to deal with.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There was a guy I used to play football against who worked for City Police. He was a bit of an arsehole. Strong and fast and a decent player but he used to moan at all his teammates and he used to go into tackles super hard for what was pretty much a kind of friendly game... you could always hear him shout "Weller's" as he flung himself dangerously into a 40-60 challenge, often as not crunching the hapless office drone untermensch who was on the other end. When that guy Ian Tomlinson was killed in a police charge a number of the players from that game claimed that they'd heard a shout of "Weller's" just before he went down... albeit not to his face.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
To be clear, they were taking the piss. It was the kind of thing he would do, there wasn't any actual evidence he did it.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
There are things I dislike about the way Nina's been treated.

I wish that the Open Letter had been treated with a great deal more critical caution than it was - it was of questionable and never-identified provenance, tendentious to the point of being indistinguishable from parody, and clearly designed to cause confusion and alarm rather than to clarify the stakes or provide a sound basis for judgement. In the event, people shared it around without, it seems to me, quite believing what they were reading, but feeling nevertheless that there must be something in it (or that it was the best means available of conveying an unease that they felt but couldn't identify clearly, either for lack of precise information or because the basis of that unease was things that couldn't properly be made public).

I wish The Wire had been more forthright about why they didn't want her writing for them any more. It might have stung to be told "you've become a reputational liability and we're not prepared to stick our necks out for someone who's taken the kinds of stands you've recently been taking on things", but it would have been kinder in the long run than the mealy-mouthed way they actually went about it.

I wish the TerfsOutOfArt account had stated their case against her in a document signed by its authors, publicised it appropriately, then directed anyone they felt needed to be informed about the matter to that document. I dislike the mean-girls style of activism - whispering campaigns and leaning on people to dissociate themselves from the tainted person. No doubt it gets results, but it's the way to act if you want to destroy a person -and it can be done back to you just as readily.

If I compare these things to Matt XG's explicit, public, owned-by-him statement of what he thought the problem was and why he was no longer prepared to support her, it's like night and day. There are ways to do these things in a principled manner.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Have we established the positive term for cancel culture? Identity politics? The quote marks are a bit tiresome and removed, but I also don't want to diminish the distance at which I hold those terms.

But it seems like these are blanket terms that intend to signify a collection of phenomena that, perhaps, prefer not to be collectively signified? Seeing as cancel culture refers to BLM, MeToo, and probably a variety of other things that can also be identified on their own. Is that why the only blanket terms associated with right-wing angles? Or am I overlooking something?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Frank Furedi made an attempt to characterise it as year-zero cultural revolution - cancel the past, overturn everything! - enacted by deracinated elites who want to obliterate all trace of historically, geographically or ethnically rooted identity. It’s a framing which neatly ties together statue-bashing, individuals catching heat for regressive behaviour and opinions, battles around “free speech” on university campuses, and a general nouvelle droit-ish narrative asserting the grandeur of romantic ethnocentrism in the face of a soulless and homogenising globalisation. A handy way of stitching individual butthurt at being called a terf, a racist, etc into a revanchist movement to defend the honour of Western Civilisation.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Thanks for the article. I was unfamiliar with Furedi - and the word revanchist. I like it.

More to the point - I admit, I read this and thought "As warranted as a criticism is, Furedi doesn't seem to convey an understanding of where "cancel culture" stems from". That is, as interested as I am in critique of such movements, the critiques are best made by those who can appreciate the various struggles at play here, rather than reduce it all down to resentment/ressentiment and tradition-tarring. This article seems to reduce the counterculture and cancel culture (which are, semantically, negative) to soulless, bond-breaking forces.

I suppose it only makes sense that these movements are as unnameable as they are. To be accurately named is to be subsumed into a sort of gallery of organs, a playbook.
 

luka

Well-known member
Frank Furedi made an attempt to characterise it as year-zero cultural revolution - cancel the past, overturn everything! -

there's been much more fun and imaginative versions of this argument circulating in conspiracy circles for a very long time.
 

luka

Well-known member
and obviously there are great and powerful currents moving in those directions. nobody is imagining this. it's very real.
 

luka

Well-known member
opposition to globalisation was a central part of leftwing identity at the turn of the century. huge anti globalisation riots.
 

luka

Well-known member
since then there has been a shift and the grand dragons and illuminati, the archons and world rulers have been recast as left liberals and resistance to the march of history and the logic of capitalism has become the province of the right, or a faction of it in any case.
 

luka

Well-known member
the left was concerned with preserving indigeous cultures and lifeways. it was the WOMAD festival. it feared the bulldozers of remorseless progress. it hated Mcdonalds. it wanted a woven Peruvian poncho and fair trade coffee made by a feminist collective.
 

luka

Well-known member
positions are becoming increasingly incoherent. tending towards an anti capitalist right and a pro capitalist left.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
If you look at Alain de Benoist's Manifesto for a European Renaissance, a lot of it reads like leftist/pomo critique of bureaucratised universalism, the global tyranny of capital, the project to create a new universal human subject in the image of homo economicus etc - it gels perfectly well with that antiglobalist left critique. But it then attempts a fusion of that with ethnonationalism: arguments for racially homogenous communities, manifesting the splendour of their difference in separation from each other (Furedi is now talking about the importance and usefulness of "borders", in a sense which does not particularly discriminate between abstract boundaries between cultural groupings and literal nation-state borders, along similar lines). In no time at all you end up with Generation Identity-style fascism. It's quite the conjuring trick.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Incidentally, this is part of the reason I think for the current Gender Wars: again, borders and boundaries, the separation of men from women, the maintenance of distinct and discrete spaces, line up with the reactionary imaginary, which then characterises any slackening in this separation as tending towards a chaos of "free choice" governed ultimately by consumerism and the anarchy of the market.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
So the right claims the privilege of speaking for the real - you can't take your sex off a supermarket shelf! It's part of who you are prior to any choices you might want to assert about your social presentation, or demands you might make about how others must recognise and refer to you! - while the left are characterised as "cultural marxists" who want to tear everything down and dismantle all of the operating principles that have guided civilisation so far, supposedly in the interests of justice but really (this is the conspiracy-theoretic twist) in the service of the unlimited expansion of global capital.
 

luka

Well-known member
again you can see this most clearly when looked at in its most developed and perfect form, in the conspiracy fears of transhumanism.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I was unfamiliar with Furedi
He led a notionally ultra-ultra-leftist group in the UK called the Revolutionary Communist Party back in the late 70s, which was notorious for devoting most of its energies into fighting other leftist groups. It eventually morphed into a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM, which shut down when it lost a lawsuit against a TV station over their (LM's) false claims about a photo of Bosnian Muslim prisoner in a Serbian concentration camp, which sought to deny that any such camps existed. It then morphed again into an online mag called Spiked, or rather "Sp!ked", which has since dropped any real pretence at being "left-wing" but still likes to style itself as vaguely "radical" while existing basically for no reason other than pure contrarianism and offering pretty standard right-wing talking points such as opposition to identity politics, climate change "skepticism", free-speech absolutism etc.

I think he's linked to various shadowy "think tanks"/pressure groups which are in turn linked to the right wing of the Tory party and the Brexit campaigns, therefore probably also to various pro-Trump interests in the USA. The word "cult" gets used a lot in relation to him and the people he works with.
 
Top