Novara Media

It doesn't. From what I can tell, in Germany (not Italy) you have rent controls, restrictions on landlord eviction and standard regulations but even then I don't think this is the case throughout Germany (just from the fact we see a lot more about Berlin in the media here...basically because a lot of writers spend their time in Berlin).

And Walker is a social democrat, he believes in regulation rather than forced land redistribution.

And land is the key fact of life here. The Royal Family are landlords, Universities are landlords, as are many bosses who buy a 2nd home. Many people who grow up by the sea/scenic areas cannot afford to live there as prices are pushed up by air BnB landlordship. It must all be destroyed and the last thing they need is to be talked to and understood in any way.

I agree with Grandpoint Genie - I was not sure what MW was actually proposing.

Was he saying that all housing should be social housing?

I assume that when MW talks to the landlords he will be critical. Or perhaps, as he's interviewing them, that won't be a viable strategy.

tbh my guess is that MW wanted a very specific "unmediated" reaction-shot response from a.n.other landlord(s) specifically to the mini-budget -- you don't set up an interrogation stroke show-trial of an entire social layer and political-economic structure by trawling thru yr own follows (which will at best supply the view from a novara-adjacent sub-niche of the class in question) and for a general whitewashing of the landlord perspective you can just pick up any other paper

i'm not going to say this is NO different from the old far-left nostrum that revolutionaries should read the financial times and ignore the guardian -- not least bcz conflicted dynamics within the hostile forces is useful to know and a reconfiguration of some sort is possibly unfolding right now -- but the differences are more abt the pay-offs of public performativity of yr craft technique than the wisdom the nostrum does contain (which is where you gain the most solid info to help shape tactics and strategy)

the pitiless panopticon of soc-med has actually made tactics and strategy much harder in all political quarters (left AND right), a point that's going to be historically very interesting if we can live thru to a point where histories get written

"the pay-offs of public performativity of yr craft technique" -- i.e. these are self-evidently mainly negative hence our response in this thread

transparency is good not bad but also bad not good to put it in ddd-speak

"the old far-left nostrum that revolutionaries should read the financial times and ignore the guardian"

Bastani repeats this frequently.

worth noting those same "far lefties" are *absolutely banjaxed* by the arrival of the internet and now subsist as tiny grumpy ageing sects

not that the nostrum directly entails this outcome BUT

the pitiless panopticon of soc-med has actually made tactics and strategy much harder in all political quarters (left AND right), a point that's going to be historically very interesting if we can live thru to a point where histories get written

always hard to predict the future but imho the current situation w.r.t. social media makes it harder, coz as far as I can see "social media will be dead within 5 years and the likes of Zuckerberg, Musk etc will be recognised as pernicious more widely" and "social media will continue to burgeon and be developed technically so we all* have (non?)invasive direct brain-to-site interfaces"** are pretty much equally likely outcomes.

* prolly actually not all
** and if you think things are bad now, that's when the sh*t really hits the fan!

"Predictions are a fool's errand" -- Dr Aaron Bastani

"It'll go higher"

my prediction

this:

Everything happens so much

— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) June 28, 2012

but more of it

I've often heard left people say you should read The Economist or the FT because you get into The Capitalist mindset. Well done Bastani for regurgitating this stuff, he'll probably get to work in his beloved media if the world doesn't burn first.

when we are mining asteroids so 15 billion people can take a crap on a 24 carat gold toilet and during adverse El Nino seasons there are no famines because ppl can make synthetic steaks on a 3d printer, then people won't be laughing at him then

If Bastani haggled ppl to read Trotsky I'd respect the trolling.

I get put off by the dissonance between their modern presentation (i.e. pretty good website and slick youtubing) and old fashioned content (not much changed since Tribune of the 80s, ie. on-point but poorly sourced and edited). That said the sweep of reporting on the site was surprisingly broad to me - I had written them off based on Bastani et al’s obnoxious screen presences and the gloomy sense that they’re all en route to being future Parsons and O’Neills

"the gloomy sense that they’re all en route to being future Parsons and O’Neills"

What is the cause of this sense?

yeah I could imagine Bastani going totally Brendan in later middle age.

not sure precisely what i wanted to prove with this but i went off and checked their relative ages:
parsons b.1953
o'neill wikipedia doesn't say but since he wrote for living marxism my guess is not later than 1980; probably somewhat earlier (he edited spiked! from 2007)
bastani b.83/84 (unsure why wikipedia is unsure lol)
sarkar 92

butler doesn't have a wikipedia entry at all but i think he's much the same age as bastani

my half-baked point is that by now the novara kids are all some way older and set in their ways than TP and BoN were when they became entirely unreadable (i suspect BoN was always entirely unreadable)

i guess sarkar still has time to do a tony parsons but this seems quite unlikely

I think that gets closer to the problem, they're just not all that interesting. Why would you watch one of their videos? What would you learn from it?

And it shows in their view counts. Their videos on Ukraine are averaging around 30K views. This is terrible for a channel with 250K subscribers. Similar sized channels are getting 10x, 20x, 50x that, and don't have the advantage of free marketing from the BBC or Sky. High(ish) subscriber count and low view count tells its own story

They're not really adding anything, what is the reason to watch them? Who is watching them? They need to be more interesting, get better guests, show some insight. Having the 'correct' opinion on anything is irrelevant if people aren't watching

Don't really agree with that. I think if they were exploring communism, or what would make for a better world, in an interesting way I might tune in.

I think Sarkar shouting "I am a communist" at Piers Morgan is v good. If they, as a collective, explored some aspects of this, it could be better, whatever the viewing figures.

Right, and there are other channels where you can watch that, you don't need Novara for that. And there are other channels that do other things better than Novara, so we don't need Novara for that either

Which then leads to the question, who needs Novara, and for what?
And I think this is what their view counts are showing

Sakar was decent when talking about the German communists on the bbc Hitler program, it was a refreshing change to hear a perspective from someone who isn't Applebum. But then they dropped her for the chess clown Kasparov in S2, because the USSR were as bad as the Nazis etc...

"Right, and there are other channels where you can watch that, you don't need Novara for that."

Even if there are, they could do it. Instead we Luxury communism, which a dead on arrival concept.

i know we all had fun with the meme but did anyone actually read the book? (i did not)

As I've mentioned before on old UKpol threads, I don't really understand the ILX downer on Novara. Tysky Sour is really good, has excellent and informed guests on everything from Brazilian politics to macroeconomics to Covid policy - I don't think there is anything similar broadcasting regularly on UK current events. Especially during lockdown it felt quite vital?

The Downstream slot has had outstanding extended interviews with people like Andreas Malm, China Mieville, Kojo Koram etc. And now they have some funding they are actually doing useful investigative journalism - see Polly Smythe as the new union/labour movement correspondent, and apparently more to follow?

I really enjoyed China Mieville's October book

I think he is a v bad writer but Ash's Novara interview with him was outstanding!

Even if there are, they could do it. Instead we Luxury communism, which a dead on arrival concept.

I don't know what Luxury Communism is, but why does it matter whether Novara create this type of content or not when other channels are already creating it?

Lol I did hear good things about that interview! xp

well I am now tempted to watch that interview now

He’s awful, and has somehow not been visited by the MeToo fairy.

mieville or bastani?

always bet on the bad one being the baldy!

Mieville.

I never heard this before about CM, but it is never surprising.

one of the things I like about Ash is she's not afraid to ask "what does senescence mean?" because I sure as hell didn't know either!

I think one of the elements about class identity that writers and commentators are bad at understanding is that it isn't totally a conscious or intellectual stance, it's something ... erm different, borne out of decades of being shat on from a great height and never seeing things getting better. I'm not saying that criticism applies here, there was some good stuff about the latte sipping/mushy peas false dichotomy

senescence is my lived experience!

I'm definitely feeling the deterioration and loss of power

I agree with ILX poster Piedie Gimbel.

"As I've mentioned before on old UKpol threads, I don't really understand the ILX downer on Novara."

Surely it isn't hard to understand. Bastani, Walker don't sound v good on twitter. Their political positions are poor, so it's not like I want to engage with Novara's offering. Same with Owen Jones.

Butler has some nice interests in lit and I like what he says on that. I engage with him in a different way, and it's cool he found a niche in the LRB but even then how does he square his politics with the piece they published on Grenfell?

As councillors and MPs are removed, not through deselection but by undemocratic & bureaucratic measures, it’s no surprise that the New Statesman publishes a plea by a has-been broadcast journalist to become an MP. Brought to you by BT/Uber & God knows who. pic.twitter.com/J6lK8BmFun

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 6, 2022

nobody is really taking Mason seriously though. His half a million + twitter followers are obviously fake as well. Even the people who PM wants to take him seriously have realised he's a moron and publicly said as much. it's not exactly Big Game Hunting!

Tom Watson going to the Lords after the Carl Beech saga is absolutely extraordinary. If you think the Labour party is anything other than a vehicle for patronage for some of the most useless people in public life I've got news for you.

These people will never introduce PR. https://t.co/zUmOPpyvuT

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 6, 2022

"nobody is really taking Mason seriously though."

Bastani has done for longer than he should have.

He'll criticise Lab every day but come election time I will even give Bastani a follow, revive this thread and link to his tweets telling you all to vote the Tories out because they are "evil".

how does he square his politics with the piece they published on Grenfell?

Frankly all UK media does evil shit and LRB publishes more leftist thinking than anything else within that sphere, don't really think the fact that that they also publish tons of right wing guff should be a dealbreaker for ppl looking for writing gigs. It's not a situation like Novara where it advertises itself as leftist, no one picks the LRB up thinking they'll get the Socialist Take on Things.

I do.

They publish 20-page essays by Perry Anderson.

I did manage to miss that..

I listened a Bastani interview with a total dickhead, a godawful ex-macroeconomist (whatever the fuck one of them is) podcaster with nothing insightful to say about anything. His schtick was "we used to live in unipolar world but since the collapse of the USSR it's a multipolar world" - wow, mind blown. It was just two horrible men talking over each other. Somehow I lasted an hour, but I was busy cooking and it was on in the background.

Guys is the quashing of human rights a bad thing if it gets the trains to run on time, I’m a “liberal leftist”

From late last year but found this interesting on Bukele and El Salvador, which filled me in a bit more on something I wasn't too familiar with

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI6gDJBCZ0

Its a bit more focused on what might happen next and likely directions than anything else, at least with 2 of the 3 guests. Probably old news but instructive for me at least

y'know, the word Strasserite is overused (by me) but

An interesting development

I’m a Christian. I think killing unarmed civilians is bad. That’s why I think Israel should be isolated like never before by the entire international community.

What they did was daft, yes. I said that and I believe it.

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) February 15, 2024

They haven't been on my timelines for a while

I think that’s a great way to raise kids, but it doesn’t mean it’s true!

— Michael Walker (@michaeljswalker) April 11, 2024

wtf is going on with these cunts. Bastani's been a lost cause for a while, now this guy's terfing it up, is this thew new RCP->Spiked pipeline or something?

I remember being surprised by Novara's low YouTube subscriber count before, given their profile booking by the BBC (250K subscribers didn't seem appropriate for something not entirely organic). I checked now and they've almost tripled to 732K which is a big move in 18 months and starting to at least be in the ballpark of respectable (great if not for their relative high media profile middling otherwise)

But then I checked Spiked. 97K subscribers, and their last video (on the topic of woke) got 14K views

aren't Spiked still funded by the Charles Koch Foundation? They can live with low numbers on YT

I presumed they were funded by someone like that, plus I assume still get the same promotional boost from the BBC that Novara does. Its just interesting that in both cases they don't really have any actual viewers of their own (though I'd say Novara's increase from looking last time is now pulling them out of that category).

That being said, the BBC or mainstream outlets that promote these kind of things probably don't have great viewership/readership figures either

not too surprised as walker never seemed like the most nuanced thinker in the first place. re the yt channel, i find the fox news editorialised presenting style (lots of rhetorical questioning to the viewer etc) v off putting. my partner and I were wondering what james butler makes of it these days.

it's embarrassing enough that Bastani keeps doing these sycophantic brownnosing sessions with Hitchens. He had this guest on called Gary Stephenson, who he introduced with effusive praise ... oh this guy is so insightful and amazing ... we had a zillion views last time he was on etc. He was a tedious mockney city trader caricature with nothing insightful to say about capitalism other than the bleeding obvious. Really annoying prettyboy who loves himself and has a book to plug. If it wasn't for Ash Sakar and Moya McLean I'd probably block this channel.

There's not much good news these but Spiked contributers regularly turning up on the BBC and Sky seems to be a thing of the past. I assume that's down to the advent of GB News and Talk TV.

I am writing this statement as unfortunately Novara Media have left me little choice. In light of the organization’s refusal to address the actions of one of its senior employees that led to the persecution of three young women of color and their ultimate conviction under the…

— Mohammed El-Kurd (@m7mdkurd) April 15, 2024

Lol @ Bastani is out of control

Statement in reference to tweet of 15 April. pic.twitter.com/TllW35rotT

— Novara Media (@novaramedia) April 17, 2024

doubling down on it while one of the women he helped get arrested is a Palestinian refugee who is now having her immigration status reviewed. An absolute fucking scumbag.

Acting and excusing themselves like any other company lol

My response to the recent tweet, and statement, made by Mohammed El-Kurd on 15 April. pic.twitter.com/6pn4WtMHBD

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) April 17, 2024