So I hear you're still a racist now, David Starkey

[Sebastian Cobb]

Well taking Starkey's interpretation of history, it would seem we did not apparently go in on 'the blacks' hard enough.

oh great, a new page!

[touchingcloth]

#cancelcobb

[idunnosomename]

still laughing up how shit darren grimes is. i know all publicity and all that.

but man. guy looks like a total sap with his "uhhhhhh it's my first day interviewing my hero who I let say 'those damned blacks' while just complicitly nodding along with his every word *pulls reasoned brow* *starts crowdfunder for legal costs*"

edit lmao this vid. as the kids rightly say: CRINGE

https://twitter.com/darrengrimes_/status/1278023697392156678

[Sebastian Cobb]

still laughing up how shit darren grimes is. i know all publicity and all that.

but man. guy looks like a total sap with his "uhhhhhh it's my first day interviewing my hero who I let say 'those damned blacks' while just complicitly nodding along with his every word *pulls reasoned brow* *starts crowdfunder for legal costs*"

It's like he's the work-experience kid version of Paul Joseph-Watson.

[Puce Moment]

Both Oxford and Cambridge have shit-tons of these old racist cunts affiliiated to them. Everyone has known Starkey is a reactionary prick who should never be given the opportunity to be on mainstream media. We've known for years. They didn't even remove his honourary fellowship - he resigned.

I'm amazed that no ambitious, snooping journo has taken the time to burrow into the connections between Oxbridge and some of the most unethical practices from the UK's past and present.

[Barry Admin]

edit lmao this vid. as the kids rightly say: CRINGE

https://twitter.com/darrengrimes_/status/1278023697392156678

Teen Vogue?

[Dex Sawash]

Teen Vogue?

I think I remember TV has not dodged gender and race issues and  been on the correct side.

[Sebastian Cobb]

This is prime shitposting but it is lol

[Barry Admin]

I think I remember TV has not dodged gender and race issues and  been on the correct side.

I'm just amazed that it's such a threat to these cunts that they'd hand a chancer like Grimes thousands of pounds.

[EOLAN]

I've always liked Brian Cox's calm dismissal of Starkey's hysterics, especially the final line here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ecEyrN6vCQ

Didn't look originally because I thought it was the scientist Brian Cox (of course Youtube linked me into a wrong Brian Cox interview with Conan after this video).
Wonderful put down by the great actor and also another clear case where Starkey just has to paint everything as some extreme version of a Shakespeare historical play.

Watched the first couple of minutes of his Grimesy interview and he was painting some altercation over cleaning a statue. Painting the guys cleaning the statues as being down to earth; hard working, good honest decent quiet men going about their day with acts motivated purely by virtue while a woman giving out to them was needless to say ( a phrase he used three times) a clearly entitled privileged part of a Chelsea cabal, studying arts and wanting to do some fuddy duddy humanistic film project just to make her feel better.
Needless to say; this was all his own projection rather than than necessarily having any value of truth in it.
And if it was so needleesly to be said; why say it.

[Johnny Yesno]

Teen Vogue?

They were quite supportive of Ash Sarkar declaring herself literally a communist.

[thenoise]

I'm amazed that no ambitious, snooping journo has taken the time to burrow into the connections between Oxbridge and some of the most unethical practices from the UK's past and present.

Any journalist with any ambition is hoping to suck up to the Oxbridge cabal, or work for them already. And probably went to Oxbridge too.

[Barry Admin]

They were quite supportive of Ash Sarkar declaring herself literally a communist.

"The left may have more influence over our culture, through the mainstream media, education, and the machinery of the state" - people are happy to give him "an average of thirty quid" because of the "culture war fighting for the very soul of our country..."

And among the examples he gives are Teen Vogue and Netflix?!  This is what right-wing maniacs with persecution complexes actually fucking worry about??

[dothestrand]

still laughing up how shit darren grimes is. i know all publicity and all that.

but man. guy looks like a total sap with his "uhhhhhh it's my first day interviewing my hero who I let say 'those damned blacks' while just complicitly nodding along with his every word *pulls reasoned brow* *starts crowdfunder for legal costs*"

edit lmao this vid. as the kids rightly say: CRINGE

https://twitter.com/darrengrimes_/status/1278023697392156678

TBF, he is giving the likes of Brendan O'Neill and Lozza Fox a platform. I never hear their opinions anywhere, right?

[Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle]

Both Oxford and Cambridge have shit-tons of these old racist cunts affiliiated to them. Everyone has known Starkey is a reactionary prick who should never be given the opportunity to be on mainstream media. We've known for years. They didn't even remove his honourary fellowship - he resigned.

I'm amazed that no ambitious, snooping journo has taken the time to burrow into the connections between Oxbridge and some of the most unethical practices from the UK's past and present.

Indeed.  Particualty Oxford, most of the colleges have built up huge endowments through the donations of dubious benefactors. 

[idunnosomename]

Trinity College Cambridge has an endowment of like 1.5 BILLION. And they all invest in dodgy shit

[Hand Solo]

Trinity College Cambridge has an endowment of like 1.5 BILLION. And they all invest in dodgy shit

I refuse to hear any disparagement of the illustrious establishment that turned out great men like Aleister Crowley, Enoch Powell, Leon Brittan and Richard Osman.

[marquis_de_sad]

Indeed.  Particualty Oxford, most of the colleges have built up huge endowments through the donations of dubious benefactors.

I imagine their endowments are mainly based on land holdings.

[touchingcloth]

Indeed.  Particualty Oxford, most of the colleges have built up huge endowments through the donations of dubious benefactors.

Cambridge as well, though as well as benefactors a lot of the endowments for the colleges of both universities come from land ownership going back way before the present day. I've heard it said that you can walk from Lands End to John o' Groats without ever stepping off Oxbridge-owned land, which I can well believe with having a friend who's a tenant farmer in Herefordshire and whose landlord is Brasenose, Oxford.

I'm not sure what could be snooped on by a journo, though. There's a load of dusty old racist cunts at both universities, but I think that's less something they're trying to encourage[nb]Well, Oxford maybe. [/nb] than a function of being elitist. There was a time when that meant that people literally paid money or relied on their family to get in - hello, Charles, you thick gouty-handed prick - but even now they've switched to an ostensibly more meritocratic approach it lingers; if an admissions process values a classical education, then that automatically biases them towards a limited pool of schools, and by extension towards dense Starkey-Rees-Mogg types, at least for certain subjects.

I'm not saying there's nothing in it, just that snooping in that particular area would spiral into a piece trying to take down all of elite British society. Circles in spirals, cunts within top hats.

[TrenterPercenter]

Just been catching up with all this.  He was always a massive fuckwit racist/sexist/elitist something particularly vile about a working class person developing such an obvious distain for where he has come from.

Saw Bastani's take which was great, though I was thinking that really what Starkey said doesn't even deserve his thoughtfull critique, it's just out and out racism.  My blood was fucking boiling when made his comments around black people being thankful for the British Empire, modern west and going back home "you've wouldn't last 5 minutes"....get to absolute F**KING F**K! How fucking dare he the f**king miserable privelidged c*nt.

I tell who wouldn't last 5 minutes? This f**king racist old c*nt, if he wants to say stuff like that to people in real life and not some little rightwing tory boy sycophant.

[Johnny Yesno]

"The left may have more influence over our culture, through the mainstream media, education, and the machinery of the state" - people are happy to give him "an average of thirty quid" because of the "culture war fighting for the very soul of our country..."

And among the examples he gives are Teen Vogue and Netflix?!  This is what right-wing maniacs with persecution complexes actually fucking worry about??

It is. They see leftist influences everywhere. Anything that expresses a socially liberal value is leftist. That's what confirmation bias does.

People like this tadpole lack the imagination to realise that the liberal values espoused, say, on Netflix programmes have been hard won by decades of activism in the culture in which it operates rather than because it has been infiltrated at the top by communists. They also invariably fundamentally misunderstand neoliberal capitalism as being left wing because of its lack of interest in directly discriminating against people.

[Astronaut Omens]

And among the examples he gives are Teen Vogue and Netflix?!  This is what right-wing maniacs with persecution complexes actually fucking worry about??

To be fair, the unambiguously pro-Marxism article that appeared in Teen Vogue in 2018 was an astonishing moment in the history of the circulation of left wing ideas. I still can't quite get my head around the fact that this happened:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/who-is-karl-marx

That article was a win for the left, it's not surprisng reactionaries were taken aback by it.

[idunnosomename]

Its funny with Marx. Right wing think tank champs can only say EVERYTIME MARXISM WAS TRIED IT FAILED and never ever engage with the substance of ideas of class struggle and the context for why he wrote his work. As if economies can just objectively fail anyway. You can easily argue capitalism is failing in lots of places.

Oh it's because the current bourgeoisie want to keep the structure that benefits their power in place. They spread anti-vax shite because they don't want to pay for your healthcare. Freedom, but no rights. So they can make as much money as you want and you die of covid clutching your teslaphone.

You silly billy darren. You silly billy.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

Its funny with Marx. Right wing think tank champs can only say EVERYTIME MARXISM WAS TRIED IT FAILED and never ever engage with the substance of ideas of class struggle and the context for why he wrote his work. As if economies can just objectively fail anyway. You can easily argue capitalism is failing in lots of places.

Oh it's because the current bourgeoisie want to keep the structure that benefits their power in place. They spread anti-vax shite because they don't want to pay for your healthcare. Freedom, but no rights. So they can make as much money as you want and you die of covid clutching your teslaphone.

You silly billy darren. You silly billy.

I love the notion that the only two options are rampant, greedy, unregulated capitalism, or  an oppressive Communist dictatorship. Oh god nobody try to think of any other system we could put in place now

[TrenterPercenter]

I love the notion that the only two options are rampant, greedy, unregulated capitalism, or  an oppressive Communist dictatorship. Oh god nobody try to think of any other system we could put in place now

A communist dictatorship is not anything Marx suggested.

The focus on communism is just a distraction from the main work of Marx which is capitalisms failures, crises and oppressive tendendacies.

[marquis_de_sad]

A communist dictatorship is not anything Marx suggested.

Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society

[TrenterPercenter]

Not sure what you are suggesting here.

[chveik]

I suppose marquis is suggesting that "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a key marxist concept. and that the ambiguity of the expression has confused a bit Lenin and his boys

[TrenterPercenter]

Yes I took it as that also.

However dictatorship had a different meaning when Marx wrote about it, and a dictatorship of the prolateriat isn't what PGC was alluding to when he said a communist dictatorship. He means the actual communist dictatorships that progressed to Sovietism.

It is a pretty well heeled rightwing lie to use Marxs dictatorship of the prolateriat as meaning an actual dictatorship in the modern sense, you know, its the kindof thing Peterson and Shapiro say....

[TheBrownBottle]

Given that the word 'dictatorship' found its modern meaning in the 16th Century, I'm pretty sure Marx (and his intended audience) understood his meaning precisely. 

Of course it means the same in all senses - absolute authority / control - which is why dictatorship of the proletariat means absolute authority / control is in the hands of the workers (owning the means of production etc).  We can agree or not agree as to whether or not this would be a good thing, but it's best not to play semantics because it might make Marxism sound bad.  Incidentally, I don't think Marx was overly concerned by the notion; it's been a while since I read it, but if memory serves the Manifesto predicts revolution & short-lived violent bloodshed rather than talking too much about any dictatorships, which he saw as a (necessary) truncated transition between capitalism and socialism.  That the dictatorship of the proletariat wasn't to be the outcome of the class struggle, just another stage on the dialectical journey.

I'm more than uncomfortable with the entire notion, to be honest, as it makes almost zero sense in a modern world which is moving away from the production of goods through manual labour (how can the means of production be controlled if the product isn't a physical object?).  Any idea which requires advocates to shoot people to make it happen doesn't seem like the greatest of ideas to be perfectly honest.  Marxist analysis of history, that being it being the product of an ongoing struggle between the classes, rings true.  It doesn't mean that his predictions are accurate (nor desirable).

Democratic, libertarian socialism always made far more sense to me, and I do think that others on the left can damage the movement by talking about revolution & proletarian dictatorships.  Marx was writing before the invention of the atomic bomb, drones, tanks, aircraft, metal gunships etc.  It's hard to see how a revolution as he saw it could happen in a modern society today.