Disgusting right from its tortuous opening, which some will forgive as a dilletantist flourish, but which in fact is doing yeoman’s work in defining a narrowly eurocentric perspective on events in north Africa:
The Arab peoples are signifying to us that resistance and revolt are with us once again, and that history is moving beyond History.
Nothing that Arabs do can have significance unless it is signifying to “us”.
Meanwhile, other States strike at their own rebels quite forcefully, sometimes with the help of a powerful Arab neighbour.
Would be kinda vulgar to name the actors, or give geographical specifics (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan). I’m poeticizing here!! “Canaan’s ancient land”, that’s my level.
Benghazi insurgents are asking for help
Erm, okay, well that was pretty specific, but we can verify: we’ve spoken to most of them, it really is what they want.
the heavy guilt of a “West”
White man’s burden.
It is fine for the beautiful souls of the left and the sophisticated operators on the right to sigh or protest;
Smelling a nineties revival here: remember Zizek used this line repeatedly during the bombing of Belgrade? And ended up screaming in caps, “not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE”? We are in the presence of Euro-geist: it’s sophisticated shit.
We are no longer just simply in the world of Western arrogance, self-confidence and imperialism.
Reality refutes this at every point. The most outrageous lie in this piece.
it is simply in the process of melting in the fusion that begets another world, without sunrise or sunset, a world where it is day and night everywhere at the same time and where it is necessary to reinvent the act of living together and, before all else, the act of living itself.
Logorrhoea. Nothing intelligible is being said here.
So, yes, it is necessary to keep a close eye on the strikes that are aimed at undermining the vile assassin of the people; sure, it is necessary to strike - him, of course, not the people.
Imagining Prof. Nancy here, anxiously overseeing the computer monitors at the command control of the French airforce, shouting ‘Non, zat iz not Qadaffi’s harem, zat iz a wedding party! Keep going!”
It is up to the people in question and to all others, including us, to ensure then that the oil, financial, and arms dealing game that installed and maintained this puppet (among many others) in power does not start over.
Yeah, this time is different. We’re gonna get rid of all that nasty shit. Once the smoke clears.
It is the responsibility of the peoples, yes: and it is also of course to us, the peoples of Europe or America, that this is addressed.
Is there anything that happens in this world that is not addressed to ‘us’, in the final instance? Is there anything in this world that doesn’t ultimately demand the response of a West whose sheer depravity and savagery has been demonstrated again and again over several hundred years?
It is a delicate task.
Uh-huh.
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ReplyDeleteLaurie Penny the fanciulla del West too feels THIS TIME, as Baudrillard said of bombing belgrade, WE are on the right side of the universal because she spoke to "the Libyan people".
ReplyDeleteShe visited them, they are squatting a Gadaffy property in London
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qgvj
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ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMnvtcWpozw
ReplyDeleteMr. bouffant bullshitting again. "Mooz-lim! But mod-er-rat!" "Not fash-eest like Hamas!"
At least he spared us his chest hair this time. Of course Jeremy reserves the toughness for Atwan.
just in case you haven't seen this:
ReplyDeletehttp://twitter.com/pennyblah
also, remember that whole "i don't want to pay you anything close to minimum wage to write my book about how bad capitalism is for me" incident? look half way down this page: http://www.zero-books.net/book/upcoming page,
what a surprise!
meat market?
ReplyDeletehttp://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/4647/
look at this shameless black haired slut will you? she's brown! it can't be natural can it? how disgusting, brown skin! she looks like an animal! she needs a beating, I tell you, a whupping, then you can cut her up, perhaps rape her, cut off her breasts, that'll teach her, the selfish bitch, how dare she be brown, beautiful and dressed up! what does she have to complain about, there are people like me in the world, bottle blondes who really think and are in intellectual anguish!
later in her book she's again furious that not everyone is white. those brown girls are dirty! clean girlms are pink, but these are all different colours, these vile animals, their limbs look like they're on backwards, they all "look like a foodstuff"...
under communism there will be no more beautiful young women! all will be forced to have disfiguring facial implants. And no more of these brown people!
all will be pink and piggy.
Re: Penny's blurb -
ReplyDelete"a founding member of the new feminist activist scene in the UK"
??? That'll be news to a few million people... I wonder what her intern's up to now. Helping Laurie invent the wheel?
PS. "xxxxxxox" - apologies for my tipsy bad manners last week.
indeed, and you can already divine this communist utopia in the avant futurism of comrade gaga who selflessly leads the way with her shoulder and face implants http://music.feelsmile.ro/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/lady-gaga-grammy-small.jpg
ReplyDeletereally, it's a reminder to us all that we just need to maintain the right level of pseudo leftist commitment and ironic reverence for pop culture and our most selfishly individualistic dreams of revolution can become self actualised!
that's why the books called "meat market", to draw in the youth. you've got to be edgy or else they won't pay attention. it's like, in capitalism women are just MEAT on the MARKET. like meat is murder by the smiths. that albums so cool. see if you don't make your theory cool todays media blitzed youth won't pay attention to it... i'm sorry what was i talking about? i can't remember. someones facebooking me and i hear there's a new squat that hasn't had its address posted online on my twitter feed that the cops read yet.
oh and wayne, don't worry about it. it wouldn't be the first time i went off on a rude rant when someone has given up on alcohol/tobacco abstinence. probably because reading blogs is one of the main ways i keep myself distracted from those activities.
ReplyDeletei think you reminded me that the internet is not the totally benign substitute for those impulses that i might like it to be and i got a bit frustrated.
Glad to hear it. Promise I'll be less touchy should you comment again. We can share skepticism of Laurie Penny!
ReplyDelete"a founding member of the new feminist activist scene in the UK"
ReplyDeletecomments like this really suggest she is a decoy of a sort. how can this be credited as feminist - to say, there are no other feminists, women are silent passive idiots of whom one really need take no notice. they have accomplished nothing. illiterates, no politics, no art, no journalism from them.
this is the old white supremacist patriarchal playbook of course - these savages are blanks. they have no culture, no history. Just fleshy cunts. I come along and create the world, with my unique intellectual powers. They are just animals. There was nothing here before I came. This land was waiting for me to make feminism bloom in this desert. It was a land without feminists for a feminist without land. Virgin territory which I inseminated.
thus her absurd boasting takes the form of a property claim - "founding member." A founding member of a new feminism. copyright claims lurking there.
She is deliberately out to promote herself as a commodified substitute feminist, a baby formula whose sales pitch is that "since women can no longer lactate, you have no choice but to turn to me!"
pennyred - there is no alternative.
oh but it's a joke right, an item on her resumé after having been committed to a mental health institution and been a "burlesque" dancer. so it's kind of a girl interrupted creative nonfiction pitch.
ReplyDeleteif you read her early blog postings, it's all about "building the brand identity". exhausted yet chirpy prole in the big city. struggling to pay the rent, dreaming of a new left etc.
ReplyDeletethen you read through the comments at that right wing guido fawkes blog and it turns out she's an oxford graduate whose financial troubles started when her inheritance ran out.
not that there's anything wrong with having that backround. i guess it must feel so "inauthentic" for the poor dear. it's just the way she's positioned herself is so utterly disingenuous, her problem is not being able to think beyond the personal. beyond self narrative and your beliefs and convictions. that's not just HER problem, it's the same for everyone i know.
i think this type of hardcore individualism is more symptomatic of my generation. it's not entirely fair to scapegoat one person for such failings. i certainly can't claim to be much better. there's really little conviction that it CAN be different. the idea that it could is preempted by the knowing reflex of smug self satisfaction. "i'm too smart to believe in anything".
i've thought hard about what it is that separates the thinking of leftists my age from older leftists. those of us who are too young to remember anything other than the end of history. my diagnosis is that we were encouraged to see our short lived western dominance as eternal and we bought into this as a fundamental construct of reality.
"nothing can really change, but in order to avoid sinking into nihilism at the meaningless of the present, we should act as if we believe it could".
this, i think, is what underlies our thinking. because we all really did buy into the end of history narrative, and not only that, but the so called "optimism" of the 90's was really a subtle message about how to behave. we bought into a kind of magical thinking, nothing can change, there's really nothing to do, it was always going to end up this way and it will be like this forever - therefore be positive and apolitical. the greatest threat seemed to be a lapse into nihilism due to the meaningless of doing anything at all under these conditions. and our culture instructed us very clearly that the solution to this was to perform a sort of disavowed simulation of purpose and belief. "be the change you want to see in the world". aggressively apolitical and conformist, the whole point was that we should act positive precisely because there was no real reason to act positive. belief, fundamentalism, that's obviously a threat because it can make you look foolish and you're bound to be disappointed. everyone bought into this idea and it lead us to hipsterism. we still haven't successfully clamoured out from this dead end but it seems we are at least beginning to.
this is why people today exhaust themselves into a depression, because they really do believe they can "be" happy. like they can will this state into themselves by power of thought and attitude. because they are all smart nihilist who don't believe in anything, just being positive because you don't believe in anything. you're free to pursue nothing but pleasure! the act of affirming your positivity will itself be the solution to the desperately hopeless inertia of your apolitical and puritanically hedonistic journey alone through the end of history.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteit was of course a totally false binary presented to us - one of either being "cool", hedonistic, ironic, realistic and apolitical or being a doomed yet rabid fanatic. the point of this operation was to limit our ability to think outside of the strictly personal. it soon follows that what matters is belief and being convinced you have an actual self to work hard at defining and enjoying. so you go from the "apathy" and withdrawn collective shrug of the early 90's to the selfish hyper individualism of the late 00's where everyones working so hard to affirm that they really exist and are really enjoying themselves.
ReplyDeletepenny is a symptom of all this, as am i and everyone else i know. she's a careerist no doubt, i'm sure very aware of the conflict between hipsterism and politics. she probably knows and would agree with most of what i've said, it's just getting beyond it that's the really difficult thing. if anything, penny's only able to modify her hipsterism to give it a political slant. that's not exactly awful but its certainly not good enough. i'm sure she's a likeable and decent person, she's just as stuck as the rest of us.
it's obviously that penny KNOWS exactly what her job is and what role she's training herself to play. you can't manufacture a career for yourself without knowing exactly how you are to be exploited and what counter revolutionary function you are to assume for the status quo. be that the knowing irony in your performance of a earnest but niaeve revolutionary or whatever. she just figures its better than nothing, and there's nothing else to do, and besides anyone who isn't a media darling isn't doing anything important anyway. probably just an old fashioned "cockroach".
her attack on the swp was telling, she's angry at these people who remind her that this glorious neo liberal future didn't quite destroy any structures of impersonal and collective identity. she's angry at the swp because there's a part of her that thinks she'd have to give up her identity and set out on a grim life of earnest but pointless leafletting and marching in order to be really "authentic" in this way. its more about the backround and narrative and story of the speaker than content or action. what matters is a media performance of a self that is concerned with issues like feminism. she probably feels this is the best anyone could do.
again, symptomatic of hipsterism and its aggressive insistence that everyone shut up and be an individual and don't dare think we can ever come together to enact any programme of beliefs ever again. because that's all part of the past and it hurts to think about how little we understand the present beyond how it relates to our own miserable selfishness.
anyway, hopefully that was a somewhat coherent (or not!) analysis of the kind of place that someone like penny is coming from.
" whose financial troubles started when her inheritance ran out."
ReplyDeleteah, so much more is coming when the folks die...millions. which explains her hostility to the cockroach swp, who are to be exterminated, the erased feminists, the working class women who are to be her silent followers and fans, and the lies about "boys" from "the most deprived bgs" she claimed she witnessed committing violent crimes in London.
she saw them, they were brown and black, in a hurry...it just seemed to her they must be running from the scenes of their violent crimes.
ReplyDeletewell, you know some people are just savages and until one of them writes a zero book about the brutal economics of neo liberalism as seen through the prism of contemporary hip hop lyrics we cannot help but feel disdain for these beasts, languishing without literature or morality in the uncivilised ghettos.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete"yes, there's a lot of innocent victims of Qaddafi"
ReplyDeleteare there? innocent victims? Shit. We can't allow that surely. So what are you doing hanging around on the web? Go get him. Don't come back until you've got him. and OBL. No more excuses. I want to see both those muthafuckas in cuffs in my office by the end of the day tomorrow. And no more farting around on blogs for you until that's done.
I'm going to have to delete your comment so you know. And don't leave any babygadaffies on the loose either. Or anyone who has made inocents victims. I want all the victimisers of innocents in cuffs in my office by the end of the week.
Go.
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ReplyDeletei'm not the author of the post.
ReplyDeleteBut JM, you (really should stop kvetching and whining and GO GET GADDAFY NOW before he hurts anyone else.
Or get SOMEBODY.
Because your sitting around reading blogs is not accomplishing anything likely to further the protection of innocents.
I really don't want to see you here again until you have put that Colonel Q away.
ReplyDeleteHer attack on the swp was telling, she's angry at these people who remind her that this glorious neo liberal future didn't quite destroy any structures of impersonal and collective identity. she's angry at the swp because there's a part of her that thinks she'd have to give up her identity and set out on a grim life of earnest but pointless leafletting and marching in order to be really "authentic" in this way.
ReplyDeleteI feel that she is very in tune with authority and power and has a good instinct for how to please, and she sensed that this would endear her to her employers and her mentors like Johann Hari. I'm pretty show this is how she operates. This will get her in with the liberal establishment - it works, as does her apparently "spontaneous" interest in whateverthefuck the msms hypes, all the bestselling headlines and celebs.
She's a pundit journalist! That's what they're hired for, no? It's all in the game, as your favourite cop show would have it...
ReplyDelete"until one of them writes a zero book about the brutal economics of neo liberalism as seen through the prism of contemporary hip hop lyrics"
ReplyDelete.... Looks like you've head me off at the pass...
Really amazing blog thanks for sharing!
ReplyDelete