russell brand - C or D?

well it pretty obviously is

no one ever argues against intersectionality as a (VERY SIMPLE) idea, they always derail the argument into tone policing, as if they'd happily take race etc into account if only some people on twitter weren't so rude

The one comment I did like was the one which takes the argument globally and considers what kind of privilege a working class person has in relation to workers in the developing world.

Most ppl come across as asses on twitter

It's like a global amplifier for blurting out shit you should probably think through.

personally i think that left activists should be seeking to expand class consciousness and to forge the recognition that in 2013 the majority of people who consider themselves middle class are in a strictly Marxist sense proletarians. the notion of identity as a diversion from class struggle is pretty senseless imo, for reasons like those argued by Angela Mitropoulos above, and because to deny identities feels like a sectarian gesture or a nostalgia for older, privileged values

behind this 100%

He's otm re: the neo-anarchists though

another important response (that taught me a lot i didn't know)

http://notjusttheminutiae.tumblr.com/post/67991755129/k-punk-and-the-vampires-castle

Moving along to the present, a battle for dominance is being played out on the terrain of identity by white male leftists stung by the explosion of new, subaltern perspectives emerging on social media platforms like twitter. What is being reconfigured here is the notion of democracy. If Fisher was listening he would hear that it is a democracy that moves beyond the kind of nationalism celebrated by Fisher, Owen Jones and Left Unity types who would like to see Labour return to being the party that built the NHS and the welfare state in 1945.
...
The British working class is not some monolithic lump waiting to have the right ideas injected into it. We are always striving towards the truth of our situation. To get there involves discussion. Some of it uncomfortable because it shows up those those nether regions we’d rather ignore. Like the casual racism or casual sexism. And it takes an act of courage, not malice, to point it out

the only denial i've seen in this entire debate is denial of brand's sexism

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 27 November 2013 17:53 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this in spite of Brand himself accepting that while he doesn't think he's sexist, his language and behaviour would often indicate that he might be, and that he really isn't the best person to judge.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CJiMltRI5UQ/TUWv0Hz_T4I/AAAAAAAAWcY/HiILgHu7a9Y/s1600/wargames-quote-not-to-play.jpg

He's otm re: the neo-anarchists though

― Deafening silence (DL), Thursday, 28 November 2013 12:48 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how so?

this whole debate boils down to fisher's reductivism, and I will be equally reductive in saying that he simply doesn't have the patience or the decency to engage with the sheer clusterfuck of oppressions that exist in society

I recognise who he's talking about from the description. Which is a different group from the so-called Vampire's Castle, which I agree that he misrepresents badly.

I would say that Fisher's past work allows him a bit of leeway in a moment of frustration but I guess you wouldn't agree.

I found myself largely agreeing with what he wrote right up until the first subheading and the Vampires' Castle, at which point it span into a fairly demented personal obsession with false binaries of class/race+gender and the ironic construction of an argument-identity that refused to recognise the validity of intersectional arguments, not to mention an Absolute position from which it would be difficult to climb down

I haven't read the fisher article but lolomg he's still doing that vampire thing?

Felt to me like he was trying to construct a coherent argument out of his frustration with left-wing infighting (and to hell with "tone policing", it can get incredibly vicious) but it doesn't work and runs the risk of telling various marginalised groups to shut up and wait. I get the frustration but the best response is to take a deep breath and decide whether to engage or ignore with certain individuals rather than trying to build a generalised intellectual framework around it.

Basically if you wanna ground-zero queer everything up you've gotta accept that this entails intellectual responsibilities* & once you've got your head around this then yeah you can chill & crack out the jokes

*this is not academic snobbery - I have no academic grounding in gender studies, intersectionality, sociology &c - it's simply the demand that everyone is taken seriously, every complaint is considered, initially at least, as valid. not 'intellectual' as inaccessible bijou of privilege but as universal ability to apply yr damned mind to the situation

strikes me that Fisher is unchill & anti-intellectual in some fairly savage ways, despite his noble sentiments & obvious desire for a fairer planet - this disconnect has manifested in a strangely oppositional and polarising rhetoric that helps precisely fucking nobody except those who would prefer the Left a self-defeating morass of tragedy

I stopped reading at the Vampire's Castle header and it was STILL complete point-missing nonsense.

DL the thing is that the Left must - must - strive to engage with every voice, no matter how briefly - and engage with it until clarity is achieved. If you want to ignore certain voices to suit your taste then the whole destructive cycle begins anew.

inaccessible bijou of privilege??

Have you read anything Fisher's written btw? Because anti-intellectual he ain't.

yeah again I haven't read the article but I remember back in the day he used to go off on one about "grey vampires" but this was so ill-defined it just came off as "everyone who disagrees with k-punk on anything is a counterproductive squabbling troll" bs

xxp

DL the thing is that the Left must - must - strive to engage with every voice, no matter how briefly - and engage with it until clarity is achieved.

Strive perhaps, but sometimes you've just got to let it go because there's no clarity on the horizon.

wins otm I think. When you find yourself writing an article like this then you should stop.

xps ha, I'd forgotten about his 'grey vampires' thing. These are different vampires!

Fisher's criticisms of neo-anarchism are fine as far as they go, but as far is they go isn't very far at all. Sure, we have no reason to take secessionist Guy Fawkes mask chumps particularly seriously (though someone should remind Mark that Russell Brand is basically one of these) but he then leaps straight from that, over the serious and thoughtful anarchists like SolFed, and then right back into parliamentary democracy. There's a vast amount of political thought between naive anarchism and ~vote Labour 2015~ that he just doesn't bother accounting for.

Though that said, his politics is defended much more convincingly and even-handedly laid out in this discussion with Jeremy Gilbert http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/80_fishergilbert.pdf than in the ad hominem nonsense he's been throwing around elsewhere, although it's Gilbert doing most of the heavy lifting.

I've read this article, which I perceive to be anti-intellectual in the way it dismissed various exceptionally important parts of our ongoing sociological discourse as vampirism & forms of identity consumerism when they quite fucking clearly aren't - they're quite clearly, in fact, sincere attempts to refine & improve the discourse

merdeyeux searingly otm there

although i'd be wary of being too dismissive of the guy fawkes mask wearing chumps or indeed russell brand as they're providing a lot of useful energy that can be subsequently moulded with a dash of intersectionality but is needed in the first place to stoke sentiment

The problem is that he doesn't want to kick the hornets' nest by naming his targets but without names he only has confusing and inaccurate generalisations. I know exactly who he means by neo-anarchists and I don't think he means there aren't thoughtful anarchists as well but the distinction isn't clear.

He needs to state the precise nature of his complaint, with examples, and explanations as to why these examples are unfair. Not doing so is for me a sign that he feels that his masculinity is under threat, at which point I'm in battle mode

I know exactly whom he means by 'neo-anarchists' - me :D

idk while his broadside against n0v4r4 types was a neat little easter egg, it's still super facile and doesn't add to the argument.

are n0v4r4 types unpopular around here? iirc that one n0v4r4 type who's very nice really wrote a lucid and reasonable response to fisher's criticism of neo-anarchism from a while back, which fisher doesn't seem to have taken on board at all.

He's otm re: the neo-anarchists though

― Deafening silence (DL), Thursday, 28 November 2013 12:48 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how so?

― veneer timber (imago), Thursday, November 28,

because they pick on his media friends...laughs. actually the way that theorybros have circled the wagons around Fisher is not too dissimilar to how certain writers behave when one of their number gets called out for something. make u think.

the funny thing is that after complaining about "neo-anarchists" Fisher praises SolFed...which is composed in large part of the same people he's bashing.

Matthijs Krul was good on why the Fisher piece was a load of shit http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11339

are n0v4r4 types unpopular around here?

I don't know, I don't know what n0v4r4 is

i don't really know which specific neo-anarchists are good and which bad but i am very much pro both n0vara types and the intersectional feminist twitter crew.

about a year or so ago i actually did think there was a chance of a reasonable debate and learning when these divisions started coming to light but neither side seems much interested in that now

i have no idea if they are unpopular around here! everyone is unpopular around here, surely. i like some n0vara types tbh (i would never go as far as "very nice really", what an insult) but in as much as there is a type there's a pleased flush of recognition when one sees it characterised.

It's scattergun, I'm not denying that. One jarring note was his dig at anyone who called Brand out on his sexism when the writers I've seen doing that (two women and a black man btw) did so in reasonable terms that made clear they weren't saying that he was therefore beyond the pale and should be ignored. As the Gothic Politics guy points out, "He accuses his opponents, without otherwise naming or identifying them, of being bourgeois, academic, posh, and privileged," in order to make them fair game, when in reality many of the people he seems to be criticising are some combination of black, gay, female and working class.

The general vibe of the essay is what I believe Gramsci described as "butthurt".

Sure, we have no reason to take secessionist Guy Fawkes mask chumps particularly seriously (though someone should remind Mark that Russell Brand is basically one of these)

This is where Kerplunk's argument basically collapses in on itself. Also it's pretty obvious that he doesn't really take the accusations of sexism seriously, which when you consider this is a guy who prank called a rape hotline is pretty dodgy.

uh what

Also he doesn't seem to understand that many of the objectors are not being "snarky", they're left-wingers who are appalled at the prospect of this person becoming some kind of standard bearer and who fear it may ultimately turn out to be counterproductive.

I find it utterly baffling that anyone of Fisher's age and intellect would be so seduced by Brand that he thinks any criticism is heresy.

which when you consider this is a guy who prank called a rape hotline is pretty dodgy.

He didn't prank call a rape hotline.

Ummm, yes, I can't really understand why (a tiny number of internet) people are still going on about an interview with Russell Brand as if it has any significance whatsoever. Desperation stakes! (xxxp)

Or, to elaborate, left-wingers who are happy this is being brought into the mainstream and horrified at Brand being the person responsible.

(xpost - okay he prank called a police hotline set up in the aftermath of a spate of sex attacks).

He didn't prank call a rape hotline.

he did - http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/jul/16/russellbrand

not as high profile a stunt as prank calling someone to boast about sleeping with their granddaughter but the fact that he did BOTH...

A thing that I've notice with Fisher (I quite like some of his work, used to read his posts on Dissensus, liked Capitalist Realism) is that he loves the idea of The Big Transformative Event. He was sure that the ruling class in the UK would collapse after the Murdoch/phone-tapping thing, and there were some other instances before and after. I think this is why he's so into Brand.

Wasn't it Jonathan "rossy" Ross who blurted out the thing about Sachs's granddaughter? This is all kinda beside the point re brands sexism tho

Jonathan Ross, the Engels to Brand's Marx

Take it to the jonathan ross thread

he did - http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/jul/16/russellbrand

not as high profile a stunt as prank calling someone to boast about sleeping with their granddaughter but the fact that he did BOTH...

Well, again, it's not a "fact".

All the initial reports of the call appeared in tabloid newspapers (Sun, Mail, Mirror) and describe him calling the police.

By the time the story spread elsewhere (i.e. the Guardian article you link to here, which links to the Mail piece as its source), this has turned into an "emergency rape line set up by police".

Five years later, I see it mentioned all over the place that he was trolling Rape Crisis or something.

Here's the call, to the police, as in the original reports. Just the normal police line, which rings for a long time before being answered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iwAIxb5M_M

It's not that funny or anything, but still. He probably shouldn't be calling the police and joking about polka-dotted rapists or whatever, but this is not the act that you were describing.

I can't say that I know exactly how sexist Russell Brand is. He certainly sometimes speaks about women in curious ways. But he definitely ends up being misreported about this an awful lot, for all kinds of reasons. Another example:

"SEX-MAD comic Russell Brand was told off by Billy Connolly after he refused to start filming until a wardrobe girl flashed her boobs at him."
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/4469260/Russell-Brand-refuses-to-film-What-About-Dick-until-wardrobe-girl-flashed-boobs-at-him.html

"That [widely reported] story," says Connolly evenly, "is a total invention. A complete fabrication. It's total bollocks. It never happened. Russell was very well-behaved, and I found him very interesting."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/features/yin-and-yang-how-billy-connolly-calmed-down-just-dont-mention-piers-morgan-8412113.html

brand loyalty