I have come to love the word scab. When someone utters it, it is like they are wearing a badge that says I’m a bit thick, I live in the past, and I need little excuse to beat the weak. Sometimes you need these indicators to know who to avoid.
I have come to love the word scab. When someone utters it, it is like they are wearing a badge that says I’m a bit thick, I live in the past, and I need little excuse to beat the weak. Sometimes you need these indicators to know who to avoid.
While Labour and specifically the left of the party turned austerity into technical fascism, that doesn’t mean that we are about to see something on the scale of Hitler. Hitler had public support. This lot can’t even manufacture the appearance of support. Batshit social conservatism has hit an electoral wall everywhere, along with the simultaneous collapse of the centre left. The GOP shark jumping shows precisely the future of that direction. What Labour and their left have done, is ensured people understand how fascism is sold. That doesn’t mean anyone buys it.
Someone should say thank you to them.
I saw a tweet you made. Its not that there are going to riots on telly from everywhere, like its random, its that this is a global awakening. Occupy was a brand for a global population who have learned to connect via brands. The franchise around St.Pauls was largely as you described, there was never going to be a movement coming from it that was never the point. The nature of shock doctrine is that each shock allows transformaton but we are thirty and a bit years into it, and you can’t do that type of shock any more, because people’s entire knowledge consolidates with each shock. Neo liberalism is crumbling around us, noone needs to fight it- but wave upon wave of crisis has triggered an evolution in understanding that comes in waves. Each protest, each occurence, each bloodbath, each wave of policies, causes more and more understanding to build. That’s how shock doctrine is undone.There are things I could not say without being hounded 3 years ago, that now I dont need to say at all because everyone knows.It doesn’t matter if the word is Spring, or Occupy, or anything else. THey are just words a brand savvy population need to hang the first global expressions that the system which dominates has fucked up andn is crumbling. What is important is that a solidarity is building that does not need lefty tribes shouting at people. I partially stopped protesting when I bought Rachels school uniform last year. I realised the woman who made the dress had been exploited for the same reason I had to buy it and this system took away our choices and relied on us having the same instincts. Once that had happened, I didnt need a lefty telling me who to give a shit about. I dont need to fill a calendar with protest and I know that each wave of this glbally brings more people to where I am. I dont need to speak to them to know how the system connects us. That is solidarity.
There is something that this country does better than just about any other place in the world. We look after our history, we look after our culture, and we make it accessible to everyone. To our visitors, to our children, to those who thought they were just looking for free shelter from the rain, and we have made that part of the fabric of who we are as nation. Apart from tea, there are few things which define being British like our conservation of our heritage and history.
The first museum I went to was the Co-Op museum in Rochdale on Toad Lane, the first Co-operative, and now when I talk about the dangers in our food supply it is with knowledge about how the diet of the working class was revolutionised by branded products, co-operatives and chip shops. Knowledge I was given at 7, by looking at scales and flour bags while a man in costume explained why people needed protection against adulterated food. I imagined eating cakes made with flour adulterated with sand or metal, and understood why this had been important. This museum was recently refitted and I can’t wait to take my daughter to the new Pioneers Museum.
I am from a generation who are used to our museums, galleries, stately homes and parks being free, or at least accessible, and since my daughter was born they have been a resource I could not imagine raising a child without. Yesterday I took a gaggle of 6 year olds to see the Barbara Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, and one of them drew the ancient artifacts that Barbara had collected, telling me he knew she must have liked them because the simple shapes were the same as her sculptures.
You can’t teach that in a school, you can’t read it in a book, you have to see the objects she owned in the context of a room of her work, and the synapses have to kick in and the understanding needs no explanation. A Frances Bacon painting I was sure I knew hit me from the other side of the room, the sight of the canvas of oil and sand, nothing like the glossy print which hid the real beauty of this work.
My friends and I used museums to meet up while we navigated babies and toddlers together, our kids would be kept occupied by the polystyrene wall and stuffed birds in the Leeds City Museum, the body zone in Eureka, or by pretending to present the weather or play with the tellytubbies in the Media Museum in Bradford. We made digital butterflies in the Winter Gardens in Sheffield, and the Beamish museum is one that holds a strange fascination for my best friend’s very clever 6 year old.
The little girl next door spent the whole of the train journey yesterday talking about Mosi, she had only been once and and yet has talked about it endlessly since. Every child I know has a story about the media museum in Bradford. A museum which has never failed to show us something new, even though I can’t even count the number of times we have visited. I worked with a kid with Aspergers who knew the history of EVERY single train in the Railway Museum in York, and even though accompanying him was often tedious (You do know it’s your job to be interested don’t you Lisa?), I cannot imagine how he would have responded to news that that institution is under threat. I can’t imagine because I can’t even write about it without the sheer fucking vandalism of threatening these places creating tears which prevent me seeing the text on the my screen.
Alongside the announcement that a Margaret Thatcher Museum and Library is to be paid for at our expense, came the news that the museums which may not be London based jewels in a tourist visible crown, but which are the fabric of maintaining our heritage are under threat.
Our Conservative Government(I think they misunderstand their own name) have set the people passionate about each of these institutions against each other, to compete for which should be saved, in a game of passing bank debt to us and selling our stuff to pay for it.
These museums do not belong to the government. They are not theirs to sell, to threaten, to close, to limit access to. They do not belong to a cabinet of people, for whom they are of no more interest than a tax break if you donate. This is our heritage, our culture and they belong to us. We fought for these places, we maintain them, we keep them alive by taking our children to offer new eyes to their collections, so they will take their children and pass down our heritage. These places have more value than the considerable financial contribution they make to the places in which they are situated, and this attack is about more than saving one or two museums in a time where we need to ‘tighten our belts’.
I spend a lot of time talking about the difference between want and need, and get frustrated with those who cannot tell that social care merits more discussion than the cuts to middle class niceties. This is not about want, this is not about need, this is about selling who we are, and telling the world what we have become.
Last night I saw some pictures of a woman whose name I know as a celebrity chef and writer, the pictures showed her collector husband with his hands round her throat in a restaurant, another showed him pushing her nose back in a way designed to humiliate and subdue, during a conversation which was clearly heated. The lack of surprise in her expression I recognised even though the lens of a camera was hidden from her, and today we were all outraged and the twitter public face of the newspaper that published those photos appeared to believe the Sunday People had done her a service.
It was revealed to the nation that this woman we believe we know from TV appearances and books is in a relationship which is abusive, and the predictable outrage ensued. The only thing different in this woman’s life today is that she had to log onto twitter to show she was ‘fine’, and has been placed in a fishbowl where from now on all her actions will be judged in the context of the intrusive pictures we saw.
I don’t read the Sunday People, I don’t read the tabloids, not unless they are on a train and I want to see how far they have descended. Is it Tulisa, who has been set up with the promise of movie careers to be humiliated as a gullible ‘drug dealer’, or Kerry Katona filling our quota for women to be attacked. Is it Rihanna being blamed for abuse of women everywhere this week…
I don’t think Domestic Violence Organisations are going to be changing their procedures, to include putting a woman in a fishbowl for public judgment and condemnation, as a way of dealing with domestic abuse, and I feel sick because I understood those pictures and the expression within them as the thing that the tabloids uphold.
Even though NOTHING has changed in her life for the better, she will from now on be judged as choosing her abuse if she does not leave and the villifaction will begin soon. She now has to satisfy OUR needs. She is now the one who will face the private consequences and public.
You don’t empower women by intruding on their privacy, taking pictures without their consent and handing them over to the judgment of the mob.
Perhaps the tabloids should start addressing their abuse of women, instead of exploiting those who are abused in the culture they uphold. Like they need to address their encouragement and masking of paedophilia, while demanding Children’s Services were stripped back, and using the subject to create profitable noisy witch hunts which consolidate their power…
I won’t be naming the woman I saw in this blog post, because right now I am guessing Google is a really unpleasant place for her, and I don’t want to be one of those who adds to what has been done with her life. I saw those pictures and my perception of her changed, her life is not altered in any way but for the worse by their publication. What is in the public interest and what the public are interested in are different. If our tabloids insist on us having this vapid cruel celebrity culture, I wish they would concentrate on the dimples in this womans thighs, or their opinions of her cooking shows.
I have in my possession emails which suggest the so called People’s Assembly, funded by those who have just announced that workfare, the bedroom tax, and other disturbing and inhumane policies are fine if they are Labour policy, (GMB, UNITE Etc) are currently exploiting and using the People’s Assembly to silence those groups of people who will pay for this.
Groups who have been used to advertise the People’s Assembly, groups made up of unemployed, disabled, and ill people, appear to have been used for the advertising for the People’s Assembly and then deliberately excluded from any planning or discussion as the Labour line is trotted out.
I would like Owen Jones to confirm that the People’s Assembly is not being used to exploit the political capital of vulnerable people who have organised and is not now being used to silence them because they are inconvenient to Labour. I am sure you understand this behaviour would be less than despicable.
I am not sure Owen and his close friends would want an article detailing how, since netroots, right up to community membership of Unite, up to the People’s Assembly, they have used austerity to repeatedly do this. However this article now needs to be written and 3 or 4 people who have a wealth of evidence of this really can be very specific and detailed in their accusations about Owen and his very small group of peers. This could be prevented if it was confirmed that actually, no, this is not the case.
Make no mistake this question is not going away.
I feel like I am sat watching the deification of Julian Assange all over again. Now, am not saying that the world realising we are in Big Brother territory is good, but here is what I know. That’s a really lot of very dull information and the combination of government technology and that much information, in my experience is not likely going to end in the most efficient way.
Add tensions with companies, human error, and a lot of forms and quite frankly they are welcome to monitor my information all day long. If you can make facebook stop advertising Acai Berries to you by changing your gender and age and Amazon still offers you choices that are utterly ridiculous, am guessing Big Brother isn’t really going to be that effective.
The internet is not private, the internet will never be private. Or secure. It is contained in very small physical space and the kid down the street can get just about any information about me if he wants. My stepson used to tell me my email passwords and interfere with my desktop while I was doing the food shopping and that was years ago. Our kids are going to cringe at how naiive we were in getting used to this digital realm, and this is will probably make us grow up a bit.
I tell you what else I know, the biggest problem the US has right now is not an all encompassing Big Brother power, but that it cannot maintain it’s reach. The springs and occupies of a crumbling post war settlement tell me the US have bigger fish to inadequately fry than the email correspondence of me and my boyfriend, it’s the internet trolls you want to worry about.
I don’t care that Snowden was into anime as a teenager and while watching his deification is fun, the coconut shy he is currently sitting on is not known for nailed down targets.
I have started considering the implications of privacy and VOIP technology replacing our analogue phones, those digital files you can retrieve are fairly scary. I might stay analogue for a bit.
You wouldn’t have thought the Guardian would want the new menace to be data mining and internet monitoring, given their journalistic output, what will Shiv Malik do if he doesnt have twitter? I hope this new interest in proper internet monitoring applies to the excessive tracking crap contained in their website. I told the Guardian how much I worshipped Glenn Greenwald’s column and I may have sent them a pornographic picture, but am sure they will not recognise it as such without a sink estate and a food bank to get their juices flowing.
If it really is that all encompassing I think they should call Prism ‘Little Sister’ and the NSA should charge for file retrieval, then we won’t be worried at all. We may be entering a digital age, but there is a world outside.
