British Right-Wing Pundits

taki was ahead of the alt-right curve by a good decade tbfttl

― imago, Thursday, May 17, 2018 7:42 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the cover of Taki's 1991 prison memoir (three months in HM Prison Pentonville for cocaine possession) is like some horrifying prophecy of Milo Yiannopoulos two decades ahead of time

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TI63K6OuL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/selectall/2016/05/20/20-drill.w190.h190.2x.jpg

Even by Spectator standards, Taki is massively racist.

I can half remember some quote where he is referring to Puerto Ricans as "dusky, squat and ugly" and this was before the brexit-era Times got their special circumstances racist card, this was in the 90's!

xxp lol uncanny!

taki was ahead of the alt-right curve by a good decade tbfttl

He's an old-school capital-F Fascist but his magazine was hugely important in laying a lot of the foundations for the McInnes / Spencer alt-right stuff.

Obviously, being rich and eccentric means he gets a pass as a 'character' in the British press.

Hugo Rifkind says online 'outrage engine' makes papers swerve difficult subjects to 'avoid enraging parts of their readership'https://t.co/NjlLMMI33c pic.twitter.com/dkoSOpRljw

— Press Gazette (@pressgazette) November 22, 2018

This is a good expose on our old friends at Spiked: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/us-billionaires-hard-right-britain-spiked-magazine-charles-david-koch-foundation

It's pretty sad that they're not even Trots manqué curdled to misanthropy but just old-fashioned posho somethings-in-the-media grubbing for PR work for Monty fucking Burns

[mark can correct whichever corner of post-Leninism they actually grew out of here]

Monbiot does nice work in exposing their um "selective" reading of Trotsky

I like that he seems to have these mealy-mouthed fuckers squirming

Brendan O'Neill looks like a lovechild Frasier would deny

That photo of Frank Furedi in the Guardian article, I lived just off that corridor for a year. It's pretty fucking weird to see it crop up nearly two decades later in an article about an international right-wing conspiracy.

There's a lot more detail here: https://www.desmog.co.uk/2018/12/04/spiked-lm-dark-money-koch-brothers

I'd heard of Claire Fox but not Fiana Fox OBE.

Fiona

that map of the LM network seems to be missing some much loved ILM indie-rockers:P

LEAVE GAZ ALONE

I think Gaz might to need to look at more lucrative options than becoming a regular Spiked contributor, my cousin has a shit hot wedding band company called Rock My Reception!

Which is more lucrative, writing puff pieces for Nazi businessmen or coming third in the Mercury Music Prize every other year?

they're a mid-70s offshoot of IS (which underwent many splits at that time: what was left evolved into the swp): the revolutionary communist party then split from the revolutionary communist group* over tactics relating to anti-apartheid (ribald voice from the back: "yes, furedi was pro! etc etc haw haw") -- its organ "living marxism" (so-called bcz everyone else's was declared dead) was active until the mid-90s, when a journalist they libelled during the yugoslav civil war sued it to extinction. they were rebooting at this time as radical libtertarian cyberlefties anyway -- they ran and made a lot of cash from the early internet cafe cyberia -- and (presumably cynically) adapted to harmonise with the tech flavour of libertarianism instead. even in the early 90s the other trot orgs mocked them as a yuppie party

*according to wikipedia, the RCG's paper fight racism! fight imperialism! is still running for nearly 40 years, tho it's a LOOOOONG time since i've seen a copy on sale. rumours that Spiked! is abt to be renamed don't fight racism! don't fight imperialism! are too funny to ignore

a couple of them (as students) wrote for me at the wire! but both seem -- via the magick of goggle -- to have evolved into entirely ordinary leftish academics no longer tangled in such garbage

Glad somebody had a happy ending

most of that is in monbiot's article now i read it -- this line ("In 1974, the International Socialists split after a dispute over arithmetic in Volume 3 of Das Kapital") is amusing but misleading. all spilts in the IS were abt personality clashes among the leadership, and every single splinter-sect coalesced round a different egomaniac

here's the section on the IS/RCG/RCP split in john sullivan's classic 1988 essay on fissiparous UK trots (very dated, the whole thing is still worth reading)*:
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/pub-7rcgrcp.html

*no one was rightwing at this point, tho there were likely a great many mutual accusations to this effect all the same

It's no Fools and Horses

Brendan O'Neill looks like a lovechild Frasier would deny

Looool perfect.

I feel like this sort of forensic takedown of what Spiked are about and how they function (which I know Monbiot has been doing for a while now) is a better way to deal with them than the approach I see from a lot of leftist commentators on Twitter, where it always seems to be 'Oh no, look at this new horrible thing Brendan O'Neill has written' with 50 retweets - which just gives them what they want I think?

Of course it does, like when fuckwits kept giving Katie Hopkins the attention she craved

This whole thing is so transparent, the endless feedback loop of wankers DESTROYING other wankers. I notice I haven't seen many of my Canary-following friends bigging up Jonathan Pieface lately, but it was obvious from day one what an unfunny useless arsehole he was

I heard this typically unfunny cunt on R4 last week called Geoff Norcott. His unique schtick was that he's a comedian and a Tory voter like as if ho ho ho what an absolute enigma, a comedian whose politics absolutely suck shit.

I feel like this sort of forensic takedown of what Spiked are about and how they function (which I know Monbiot has been doing for a while now) is a better way to deal with them than the approach I see from a lot of leftist commentators on Twitter, where it always seems to be 'Oh no, look at this new horrible thing Brendan O'Neill has written' with 50 retweets - which just gives them what they want I think?

I'm not sure they need retweets when one of them is on national TV or radio almost literally every day.

Can't believe Merrick would be so let down by her favourite feminist PM pic.twitter.com/LrgGwIgRjm

— Sam ✌️ (@samisam147) December 12, 2018

🙃

These takes are so mad considering there was a fuss about May being Home Sec/Minister for Equalities & Women despite having opposed gay marriage in the past and endorsing splitting up families and detaining people in hellish immigration centres. Not to mention austerity notably hitting women harder. Still, those shoes, eh?

Nb: I have always thought her shoes are terrible.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p06sbrpd/jonathan-pies-american-pie

This mocku-docu-mentary is Louis Theroux meets Alan Partridge meets the Koch brothers.

happy xmas noodle vague

Rebecca Nicholson in the Guardian is not a fan of the Jonathan Pie special

Partridge is funny because he is pathetic and human; Pie just has a sneering superiority complex. Theroux offers insight because he listens to people; Pie has too many scores to settle to offer an impartial ear.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/dec/13/tv-review-jonathan-pie-american-pie

Are you still struggling to justify voting for Jeremy Corbyn? This should help. Destitute, self-pitying, public school pervert, Toby Young says that a Corbyn government will mean he has to sell his house! pic.twitter.com/Yy9VIEK9Wy

— John Spiers (@squeezyjohn) December 13, 2018

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuTW1OqX4AAhKwL.jpg

beautiful.

Stick that on posters the length and breadth of the land - Young's face on the left, this text on the right - Labour landslide.

I knew he was butthurt about losing the education post when he was presenting a R4 program about Character and repeatedly kept mentioning how he was hounded out of a job by the twitter mob. But didn't realise he'd managed to poison all the other wells he was drinking from, apart from the fucking Spectator of course!

I'll say a prayer for Toby (that he ends up homeless and dies on the streets).

God I hate Jimmy Bollix SO MUCH.

Stepping in to defend journalists at the Mail & Sun:

This is predictably getting piled-on (the irony of complaining about abuse and its dangers when you cause frequent abusive pile-ons aside) – but: plenty of journalists who do great, public interest work holding power to account started at newspapers OJ and co don't approve of. https://t.co/nERSyRcy5t

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 14, 2019

Personally I'm referring to people who directly write articles whipping up hatred against minorities and women.

— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) January 14, 2019

OJ offers the above as clarification AND THEN:

Other reasons people can find themselves at such outlets: people’s politics change, people grow up with Tory parents, people come from local news and get offered a secondment to a National their group owns that you’d be mad to then down, etc

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 14, 2019

People may then change their view (none of which wd excuse writing the hateful stuff, but as has been noted, many don’t). Or not change their view but do we really hold someone doing casual sports shifts equal to Rod Liddle? And if our bar is that high aren’t readers on the hook?

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 14, 2019

He’s such an awful cunt, how does he even have a job?!

who wouldn't jump at the chance to earn a living inciting hatred if it meant secondment to a thriving national newspaper?

Am I being oversimplistic or are all the people scolding other writers for being choosy about which outlets they write for, straight and white?

I don’t think JB is?

I’m on a fair few FB groups for journalists/freelancers and many of the members write for Sun/Mail etc and of those, most of them HATE Owen Jones (I think they would all sell their grannies for his profile TBH but I’m sick of them saying he wouldn’t last a week in a newsroom blah blah blah).

Yeah that doesn’t surprise me given how openly contemptuous a lot of the higher profile ones are on twitter. And definitely part jealousy but also the politics.

Journo groups: GO HADLEY GO, BODY HIM
Twitter: Fuck off, Hadley, you’re a TERF