Watch this abject careerist sit there in a BBC studio, squeaky-clean and ingratiating in his good-boy top-of-the-class rig-out (complete with Remembrance Day poppy!), silently allowing Jeremy Paxman to browbeat and bully his fellow-student Clare Solomon. Watch Aaron Porter solemnly condemn (as "despicable") the non-existent "violence" of his unruly student flock while the despicable British government wages class war on the British populace and continues to wage actual bloody war on any Muslim country it chooses:
Surely Aaron Porter is a future top Labour Party politician? And surely he knows it.
[Also despicable: Paxman. But that goes without saying.]
She's very good.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing Poter's obedience - "do you want to you tell Clare Solomon..."
and like a trained dog he turns to her and starts to tell her...
incredible.
You say "trained dog" like it's a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteoh pink i am so sorry.
ReplyDelete"like a programmed robot."
"What age are you, Ms. Solomon? And you've been studying for how long? Ah, for FOUR years...[You layabout!] And you have a son. [Ah, single mother! Very young too. Hmmm, history of problems with impulse control...] And your son's a student too. [Another parasite! They're breeding like rabbits!] And you're on a sabbatical right now? [You lazy unproductive leather-clad...] For three months? [You mean, your VIOLENCE yesterday was being paid for by the TAXPAYER??]"
ReplyDeleteUnbelievable. And Porter joins in.
We're back in about 1967. Most of the comments under that YouTube clip and at the Guardian and elsewhere were dripping with venom - towards the students. Hatred and panic. The only thing they didn't call those students was "long-haired".
he has not yet had the update though - he should have said "I feel I can't condemn the violence of a few thousand angry protestors whose fury carried them away over the borders of legality. Their explosion of violence and the criminal damage, grievous bodily harm and endangerment of the life and limb of innocent office workers they caused was understandable under the circumstances."
ReplyDeleteoh pink i am so sorry.
ReplyDelete"like a programmed robot."
What are you, a Luddite?
I think the ease with which the hipster pundits like laurie penny are passing off visions of violence has to do with social media and different standards of physicality than people over thirty or so have.
ReplyDeleteLooking at all this footage - it's really incredible calm in there, though there is a mess on the floor. Far less jostling than in any ordinary frat party, clothes and hair neat, people holding their signs and looking around, walking carefully, no shouting, no tantrums, even carefully taking turns throwing whatever that is at the remaining glass stuck in the windowframe.
So if they are not just ideologues lying for their employers, then perhaps they are just people made very very nervous by the physical proximity of other people when those people are not quietly in a cubicle at a keyboard interacting with a screen.
the security word on this blog is chatting to me in the funniest way nowadays.
Haha!
ReplyDeleteNasty life-ist bigot I am.
Note that Paxman didn't ask Aaron Porter for a complete CV or question his right to speak (squeak) for thousands of students. Because Porter had already clearly demonstrated his qualifications as a present-and-future boss.
ReplyDeletethey dropped a fire extinguisher from a great height!!!!!!! the barbarians!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteperhaps the fire extinguisher was intended just to liberate the five or six hijab wearers below.
I wish she had grabbed Porter's glasses and stuffed them down Paxman's throat. "Now, THAT was violence, boys - you see the difference?"
ReplyDeletealter kacker sanity:
ReplyDelete"Is the student mayhem at Tory HQ in Millbank the shape of things to come? Somehow, I doubt it. Paris 1968 it ain't, much less Athens 2010. Eight slightly hurt and 35 arrests is about par for a football weekend or a pop festival."
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/routledge/
The sheer hypocrisy of Paxman, sitting there surrounded by a huge spectactural professionally designed BBC backdrop of FLAMES and BROKEN WINDOWS, blaming Clare Solomon for having PREVENTED poor him and the poor Beeb from having a SERIOUS DISCUSSION about the evisceration of higher education and the throwing of millions into debt slavery.
ReplyDeleteBlaming her!
But the most shocking thing was his pretence that he didn't even know who she was! "Are you a student?" Of course he knew she is a student! Of course he knew she was the elected representative of London's 160,000 students!
But of course he also needed a sly lead-in to his shabby despicable would-be "revealing" inquisition of her.
God i hate these people.
look how polite the crowd is really:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/8124099/Christopher-Hopes-eyewitness-account-from-the-heart-of-the-student-riots.html
the cops are totally safe there, no one is even taunting them.
the look how once the windows are down, the cops get aggressive, heaving people and showing - the cops are creating this whole scene, basically chasing people into the building.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/8123738/Exclusive-Telegraph-witnesses-student-protests-from-front-line-at-Millbank-Tower.html
then they trapped them in there.
it's really a strange event, a very strange dynamic, very strange punditry - everything about it is a little off.
As usual: ecomonic violence (with Tories as the perps or otherwise) occurring so slowly that it seems normal--the poor have always been among us...we've been living beyond our means for a long time now, dear, time for some belt tigtening...haven't people always lived in the sewers underneath Las Vegas casinos?--whereas you can see (and so are able to think about) the violent spectacle of one window breaking (or not breaking, as the case may be).
ReplyDeleteMaybe the Tories' (and Lib Dems'of course) mistake will be that of speeding up the narrative of economic violence: one which is supposed to only progress at a glacial, invisible, place.
Showing "the invisible hand," so to speak.
ReplyDeleteI mean seriously what fucking "clashes"? This tape shows clearly straightforward police brutality:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8124230/Students-and-police-clash-violently-at-Millbank-Tower.html
the demonstrators are not even spitting or shouting at them. they are just standing there politely and the cops are manhandling them.
seen some more film now and have to say at risk of sounding paranoud that really i question the integrity and motives of anyone present at the scene who would call that crowd violent. There is not one sign of violence from demonstrators. They do not even defend themselves from those cops but let them sling them hither and thither like ragdolls.
ReplyDeleteI know standards of these things have changed since 9/11 but the evocations of "the violence" from the pundits who claim to have been there is really a slander.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muu0yMQT9sE&feature=player_embedded#!
ReplyDeleteclare solomon fantastic
here again
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/396vgnl
"I didn't see anyone hitting the police. I saw police hitting students."
ReplyDelete"I didn't see anyone behaving violently."
Right and she is backed up by these miles and miles of footage - there was no demonstrator violence, incredible as it may seem in a crowd that size and with this kind of provocation, but there has yet to surface any evidence of demonstrator violence or even use of force in self defence apart from the vague allegations from supposed sympathiser/participants who write in these liberal rags and tweet themselves to saturation of the culture producing class.
It's funky seriously.
Aren't windows people?
ReplyDeleteits incredible to see this equation of destruction of the fully insured property of rich people with direct individual violence and vicious indirect violence of immiseration against people.
ReplyDeleteor rather it is not incredible to hear this from overt reactionaries, but it the confidence with which they now advance this idea - the radio host and the tory politician - is possible only because these self-identified leftist culture workers have assented so vigorously to it. Because it is not long ago that in a conversation on a radio programme that even a reactionary would hesitate to equate smashing a window with blowing the brains and guts out of people from helicopter gunships. Ut takes a broad consensus to shift morality and the reverence for abstractions and loathing of "individual" fleshly beings enough to create conditions for the swagger. but she did a good job of showing she didn't get that memo, and she's not living in that spectacular realm where capital has all the rights and humanity none and where people have forgotten that capital is just the power of some people over others.
Response of the students to that dropped fire-extinguisher: an immediate and spontaneous chant of "STOP THROWING SHIT!"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.comwatch?v=qAGNJMQD1rA
Loud and clear. Unmistakable.
By the way, colonel, I agree that Clare Solomon did a *pretty* good job in those TV debates, but she was still far too apologetic - and, frankly, evasive - about the "violence" inflicted on those poor windows. Of course it was justified! There is absolutely no reason for her or anyone else not to say that loud and clear.
I hope many more windows will be smashed, many more computers trashed, and many more buildings occupied for longer and longer in the weeks to come.
(This has nothing whatsoever to do with Sozialromantik, by the way. It's "lenin" and his ilk who are the Sozialromantiker, with their childish pretence that those massive antiwar "peaceful protests" in 2003 were somehow - in any way - a "success". They were not a success. They were, very obviously, an utter failure (was the war stopped?), precisely because they were content to be so ineffectually "peaceful".
The comments at his blog are illuminating. What pisses many of them off about Millbank is that the self-appointed revolutionary vanguard of the ridiculous SWP weren't there to boss those students about and tell them what to do and what not to do.
Fine thing, "Leadership". At least for the Leaders.
I feel sure leninino wants socialism, but I think he is really surrounded by people one might politely call "Heideggerians" and "Schmittians".
ReplyDeleteNot much light can squeeze between left and right Heideggerians, though I am sure Marcuse was a nice guy personally; i don't know how the notions of left and right schmittians are told apart, and would imagine the "left" ones are just those who don't yet have the power to be "right". "the country" is not the protagonist of any socialist struggle god knows.
wholly agreed about the window smashing, and more emphatically about the occupation. the smashing of the windows is really neither here nor there - its for television and for the photos.
Solomon is on the spot there, she has to worry about soundbites and that she is speaking as a representative of those who elected here - I think she did a great job and tried to stress that a person is an object of violence and a window is not. The difficulty of performing in that circumstance should not be underestimated. She's not a trained tv personality.
The fire extinguisher kid lives in a grand country manor evidently.
Occupying buildings is very effective. Getting forcibly removed from buildings and arrested is very effective.
I just think that "the left" with media access should be stressing now that the protagonists of the occupation were incredibly non-violent and careful to harm no one,
were extremely patient and forebearing considering how much they were roughed up and provoked by the cops, and that there is not one demonstrator - apart from the idiot brat with the fire extinguisher - who could reasonably be charged with any crime.
The "violence" is pure fabrication. It is the lies of the media.
And now it's become fact, with this unanimous agreement between Cameron and Skynews and The Guardian to allege demonstrator violence and treat it as fact. For hundreds of years the ruling class has begged this question and suddenly after hundreds of years of refusing to concede it, the left is conceding it.
I don't think this is beyond explanation.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteviolence against windows and corporate personhood are one ideology, one mania of abstraction
ReplyDelete"The fire extinguisher kid lives in a grand country manor evidently."
ReplyDeleteHah! Well, he would, wouldn't he? No doubt he too will rise to high political office in a decade or two, just like Joseph "Joschka" Fischer, cop-kicking revolutionary vanguardist of the 70s, later a respected statesman and bomber of Kosovo.
Furthering the Revolution by throwing fire-extinguishers for the TV news teams: that's Practical Zizzism.
"Furthering the Revolution by throwing fire-extinguishers for the TV news teams: that's Practical Zizzism."
ReplyDeleteexactly.
It’s interesting just to pick up on the general tone of this “debate”. In the initial confrontation between Paxman and Solomon you can feel that something is definitely happening. Two different worlds are colliding. But when the focus moves to the other two, it’s as if the pressure is off and we’re back to the usual professional drone of “civilized discourse”. There’s even a bit of a dramatic disagreement but it has a kind of safe scripted feel. And then there’s the “humorous” quip from Paxman at the end about the familiar looking chap in the photo etc. But Solomon’s final comment, i.e. this is just the beginning etc, redeemed it . I bet Jeremy was furious about her getting that one in.
ReplyDeletethanks george. the ceremonial - can't expect much.
ReplyDeleteother qlip - adswp agrees with you about her lack of spine there and says some smart things
http://adswithoutproducts.com/2010/11/13/notes-on-violence-and-justice/
Browbeat and bully? Looked to me like Paxman was just trying to get her to answer the question.
ReplyDeleteShe was doing the annoying politician trick of evasion and trying to reframe the question. If she wasn't prepared to unambiguously support or condemn the direct action then she has not got the courage of her convictions.
Of course he should persist.
And Aaron Porter wasn't a trained dog or programmed robot on cue from Paxman - he had a priori expressed those opinions and re-stated them to her when given the chance.
We need to stay reasonable and stay smart. This debate could easily descend into emotive diatribe and defeat our own cause without a single tory having to lift a finger. Do we want to hand them such an easy victory?
"Browbeat and bully? Looked to me like Paxman was just trying to get her to answer the question."
ReplyDeleteHis question had a false assertion embedded in it. He was asking her when she stopped beating her wife.
you know, these kinds of situations are hard, being on television, for those not trained. She couldn'yt let him just rewrite history could she?
"And Aaron Porter wasn't a trained dog or programmed robot on cue from Paxman"
I was referring not to what he said but that Paxùman said "why don't you tell Clare..." and then he did, just truend to tell her. Instead of saying, I'm talking to you right now Jeremy. Like a little boy in school or a patient at a therapist.