FIRST MAN: Have you noticed how the March Violets have managed to completely overtake Party veterans like you and me?
SECOND MAN: You’re right. Perhaps if Hitler had also waited a little before climbing on to the Nazi bandwagon he’d have become Führer quicker too.
While New Labour's chief ideologues promoted the idea that class divisions were no longer relevant – part of the 'old ways of working and doing things', in Tony Blair's words – working class people of all races were feeling the sharp end of the New Labour project. Inequality of income, which had soared under Margaret Thatcher, continued to rise. In 2004, well before the financial crash, real wages stagnated for the bottom half of earners and fell for the bottom third. Disguised by the availability of cheap credit, social mobility had in fact stalled. The aspirations of many were increasingly out of reach.
Plentiful immigration, which grew further after 2004, when eight former Eastern Bloc countries joined the EU, was only one factor in keeping wages low – a 'flexible' labour market, where employers were much freer to hire and fire than elsewhere in Europe, was the broader picture – but fears about immigration were hyped by right-wing newspapers and pressure groups such as Migration Watch. Perception mattered: by the end of the New Labour era, only 18 percent saw immigration as a problem in their area, but 76 percent saw it as a national problem.
In 2009, Gordon Brown's attempt to deal with growing discontent as the economy turned sour was a disastrous speech in which he promised 'British jobs for British workers' – a slogan that could have come straight out of a far-right propaganda handbook, and one that was thrown back in his face in 2009 by oil refiners workers in Lincolnshire, who staged wildcat strikes in protest at their wages and conditions being undercut by several hundred European contract workers. Even this ham-fisted attempt to address the issue was too late. During New Labour's pomp, Hain told me, few at the top were willing to listen. Blair, along with his closest allies, simply did not see a problem. According to Hain, his warning in 1999 was met with a complacent response. 'Peter Mandelson said to me, "your preoccupation with the working-class vote is wrong. They've got nowhere to go."'
Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences.
In 1929 the writer Evelyn Waugh came to Crete on a cruise "to admire the barbarities of Minoan culture". In the Herakleion Museum "except for one or two examples of animal sculpture", he wrote, "I found nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all". On the merits of Minoan painting he was perspicaciously uncertain, "since only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last 20 years". In the restorations, he detects "a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue". At Knossos, he continues, "I do not think that it can only be imagination and the recollection of a bloodthirsty mythology which makes something fearful and malignant of the cramped galleries and stunted alleys...these rooms that are mere blind passages at the end of sunless staircases". As for the throne "here an aging despot might crouch and have borne to him, along the walls of a whispering gallery, barely audible intimations of his own murder" (Waugh 1930: 136-7).
The Ya̧nomamö will do almost anything for honey, one of the most prized delicacies in their own diet. One of my cynical onlookers—the fellow who had earlier watched me eating frankfurters—immediately recognized the honey and knew that I would not share the tiny precious bottle. It would be futile to even ask. Instead, he glared at me and queried icily, “Shaki! What kind of animal semen are you pouring onto your food and eating?” His question had the desired effect and my meal ended.
Hans van Wees discusses Demosthenes 21.103 and Aeschines 2.148 in Greek Warfare: Myths and realities (2004).In the absence of a public prosecutor, it was up to private individuals to take one another to court, and they would rarely do so unless they were motivated by personal hostility. Demosthenes was once charged with desertion by a group of his enemies, but the case never came to court. One of his prosecutors had allegedly been bought off, and was later found dead – brutally murdered and mutilated by a madman who, by some strange coincidence, had once been a friend of Demosthenes'.
We want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.
Museums: cemeteries!… Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!
That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that… But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?
And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?… Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.
Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?
In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner… But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!… Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!… Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!… Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!
From Kaleb Horton's piece "On Donald Trump and Preying Upon Weakness".We’re not in a Frank Capra movie. Gary Cooper is not going to give Trump his comeuppance. He is not going to die of his own mania in a burning barn or find God and quit the race to become a missionary. He is not a grand conspiracy meant to sneak Hillary Clinton into the White House. Denial accomplishes nothing.
He’s not desperate and he’s not losing.
And retreating to the comfort of our curated peers on social media, where everybody knows Trump is a villain, gets us nowhere. We don’t need better or smarter or funnier or more marketable ways to call him a villain. We don’t need to split hairs on whether he’s a fascist or just an almost-fascist. We don’t need any more hyperbole soloing. That won’t change the mind of a single Trump supporter.
This is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men. They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration, rock's standard downer states, but depression: depression: whose difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered the (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.
The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life - or inner death - overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty.
...
The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated and, most importantly, at its least serious. 'Ian was a laugh, the band were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got out of hand...' It's important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions - the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff' - at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males.
Ross' behavior becomes more erratic. No one has seen Chandler for weeks. Ross keeps making stews. No one sees him go to the grocery store
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
@jmshiveley Yet the stews continue. Ross eyes are dark wells and his gums start to recede. The stews continue.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
@jmshiveley Ross just mumbles incoherently about "THE DEEP KNOWLEDGE AND THE CRIMSON HUNTRESS MOTHER" when asked any question.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
@jmshiveley Joey has gone missing
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
@jmshiveley The skin around Ross' mouth is grey and leathery. He doesn't seem to cast a shadow. All he does is make more and more stews.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
Rachel begins to delve into occult studies in response to Ross' change. She becomes thrice marked to the Crone and Crow, daughter of Shadows
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
@jmshiveley She tries to enlist Monica to strengthen the binding rites of the Unsung Silent Ones. Monica threatens to tell Ross
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
@jmshiveley Monica disappears. Rachel can now see the Forms that Move Beneath. It all becomes so clear. She knows what must be done.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
@jmshiveley Rachel treads the Mansions of Silence. The taste of iron on her tongue and lips crimson stained. There are no more boundaries.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
Phoebe merely sits atop the Throne on Nine Cold Flames in the Pit of Unending Eyes. Everything has gone according to her prophecies.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015
Half the country – and the twee half at that – seems to be getting in a tizzy about a man who, given the medieval level of state formation, was basically a fucking gangster; and what’s more a gangster among gangsters: the royals were all gangsters until Cromwell taught them a little circumspection. That little princes in the tower wet job should be a clue with Richard, but there seems to be a general feeling that it was dignified by being done as statecraft. Or maybe it's a Kray twins thing: 'they only murdered their own', etc
Sure, he was a lawgiver: so was Lucky Luciano. And sure, there was that time in 1215 when the underbosses ganged up on a weak capo and took a bunch of diabolical bleeding liberties. But Richard ‘Snakey Spine’ Plantagenet played the same role in Our Island Story as Jake ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzick did in the history of Chicago. Under a car park is exactly the right place for him, at least in the absence of a flyover or a crocodile filled swamp.
Like Achilles, Roman Nose had stayed out of the morning battle, and like Achilles, his absence had been keenly felt by his warriors. The day before he had destroyed the charm of his sacred war bonnet. One of the taboos connected with it was that he must not eat food taken from the pot with an iron implement. At a feast given by the Sioux, Roman Nose ate meat served by a squaw with an iron fork. Tall Bull, his friend, called his attention to the error and urged him to take purification ceremonies at once. But that very night Forsyth's command was discovered and Roman Nose had no time for the ceremonies before the battle.
He stayed out of the first charge, saying he would die if he made it. But he was such a power that the other Cheyennes kept urging him. In mid-afternoon he suddenly decided to go into the fight. Putting on the war bonnet, he mounted. With a wave of his great arm, the giant summoned his warriors. A moment later they were charging.
Forsyth's men fought this new danger desperately. At the dead run, Roman Nose thundered down upon them. Just before he reached the trenches, a shot from some bushes to one side, brought him crashing down. Jack Stilwell and two companions were hiding there. Roman Nose's followers scattered.
The place where Roman Nose fell was on the river bank. Painfully he dragged himself out of sight among the bushes. There was he found by his people and carried away. He died in the Cheyenne village that night.
New computer security question #1: "As a child, what color was the bucket that you used to bring water from the nearest well or stream?"
— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014
Computer security question #2: "Which disease came closest to killing you before the age of 5?"
— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014
Computer security question #3: "In your experience as a child, which country's occupation army was the least vengeful?"
— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014
Computer security question #4: "What memory of violence do you try hardest to suppress?"
— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014
'I say, is it really true that the French artillery had to fire on their infantry?' Delaforce asked. 'To drive them over the top?'
'Absolutely,' Finlayson said. 'They had a mutiny. The troops wouldn't leave the trenches, so the French generals laid down a barrage on them. That soon shifted them.'
'What happened afterwards?'
'Afterwards? There was no afterwards. Why d'you think they didn't want to get out of the trenches?'
J.T. once asked me what sociologists had to say about gangs and inner-city poverty. I told him that some sociologists believed in a "culture of poverty" - that is, poor blacks didn't work because they didn't value employment as highly as other ethnic groups did, and they transmitted this attitude across generations.
"So you want me to take pride in the job, and you're only paying me minimum wage?" J.T. countered. "It don't sound like you think much about the job yourself."
And, vexingly for Eric, on the rare occasions he’s convinced a journalist that the CIA murdered his father, the revelation has not been greeted with horror. One writer declined Eric’s invitation to attend his press conference saying, ‘We know the CIA kills people. That’s old news.’
In fact, Eric told me, this would be the first time anyone had ever publicly charged the CIA with murdering an American citizen.
‘People have been so brainwashed by fiction,’ said Eric as we drove to the local Kinko’s to pick up the press releases for the conference, ‘so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, “We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.” Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.’
There's supposed to be a half-dozen or six dozen or two dozen more fucking plots in the works, like the fucking assassination metaphysic is just out there too undeniably -
Theories! We were almost lost in theories, there were so many of them.
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| TALK TO THE HAND! |
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Soviet law enforcement was equipped with the MASSIVE SLEEVES OF JUSTICE.
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Up to now, the Nazis, if somewhat halfhearted in the concealment of their crimes, have nevertheless kept up a superficial discretion that has enabled some people to avert their gaze from the regime’s true nature. With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world’s eyes. In the days that follow, Hitler will understand. For once, it is not his SS who will be let loose but an entity whose power he does not fully grasp: world opinion. Soviet newspapers declare that, from today, people will fight with the name Lidice on their lips – and they’re right. In England, miners from Stoke-on-Trent launch an appeal to raise money for the future reconstruction of the village and come up with a slogan that will be echoed all around the world: 'Lidice shall live!' In the United States, in Mexico, in Cuba, in Venezuela and Uruguay and Brazil, town squares and districts, even villages, are renamed Lidice. Egypt and India broadcast messages of solidarity. Writers, composers, filmmakers and dramatists pay homage to Lidice in their works. The news is relayed by newspapers, radio, and television. In Washington, D.C., the naval secretary declares: 'If future generations ask us what we were fighting for, we shall tell them the story of Lidice.' The name of the martyred village is scrawled on the bombs dropped by the Allies on German cities, while in the East, Soviet soldiers do the same on the gun turrets of their T34s. By reacting like the crude psychopath that he is (rather than the head of state that he also is), Hitler will suffer his most devastating defeat in a domain he once mastered: by the end of the month the international propaganda war will be irredeemably lost.But on June 10, 1942, neither he nor anyone else is aware of all this – least of all Gabčík and Kubiš. The news of the village’s destruction plunges the two parachutists into horror and despair. More than ever, they are wracked by guilt. No matter that they have rid Czechoslovakia and the world of one of its most evil creatures – they feel as if they themselves have killed the inhabitants of Lidice.
…
No one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything.Perhaps I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong.
@Londonist Room in shared flat: £350pcm. Was a bed mounted on a platform above the washing machine and tumble drier in a utility room.
— Judoon Platoon (@Judoon_Platoon) August 21, 2013
Choice London flat horror stories being tweeted by @Londonist. I once looked at one with a trail of blood from Hackney rd to the front door.
— Jess Lilley (@lilleyjuice) August 21, 2013
@Londonist I once saw a house in Deptford, the kitchen was covered in black dust, the words 'help me' was clearly written in said grime...
— Alex MacDonald (@Selected_Poems) August 21, 2013
@Londonist flat in Archway with shower in the kitchen behind a curtain. Agent said "Its space saving, and sociable".... It shouldn't be!
— Emma B (@emsypickle) August 21, 2013
@Londonist Saw a flat advertised as having '3 split-level mezzanine bedrooms'. Turns out that's code for '3 built-in bunk-beds'.
— Flora (@AccidentalLDNr) August 21, 2013
@Londonist Saw a house in Harrow where you had to climb through the shower to get to the bath, which was situated 10cms from the ceiling
— Emily Waddell (@callsignemily) August 21, 2013
There have now been three examples of properties being offered with no actual roof. Three.
— Londonist (@Londonist) August 21, 2013
I've seen them all right. I was in sunny Italy when the Fascisti went for the Freemasons in twenty-five. Florence it was. Night after night of it with shooting and beating and screams, till you felt like vomiting. I was in Vienna in thirty-four when they turned the guns on the municipal flats with the women and children inside them. A lot of the men they strung up afterwards had to be lifted on to the gallows because of their wounds. I saw the Paris riots with the garde mobile shooting down the crowd like flies and everyone howling "mort aux vaches" like lunatics. I saw the Nazis in Frankfurt kick a man to death in his front garden. After the first he never made a sound. I was arrested that night because I'd seen it, but they had to let me go. In Spain, they tell me, they doused men with petrol and set light to them.
Nice chaps, aren't they? Picturesque...
We start carrying semi automatics, they buy automatics, we start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds, and you're wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops.
@jackbuckby What are your favourite five works of art?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's the best dream you ever had?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's your favourite stage of human evolution?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's the oldest building you've ever been inside?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby How fast is your favourite British person (living or dead)?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What is your least favourite form of artistic expression?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's your favourite red meat side dish?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby Which foreign language would you least like to see an episode of 'Friends' dubbed into?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby How cloudy would it have to be for you to consider taking a precautionary umbrella to Ascot?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's your favourite colour about the real meaning of culturism?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's your least favourite vowel in the word 'Fatwa'?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's the strongest plastic you've ever leaned against?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's your favourite shape of sunroof?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby Where's your favourite swamp?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's the least funniest sex crime you've ever read about?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's your favourite font size?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby Who's your favourite European TV historian?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby What's the longest you've ever waited for a miracle?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 27, 2013
@jackbuckby How warm would a glass of tizer have to be (fahrenheit) before you would tip it away?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 28, 2013
@jackbuckby Describe the most lacklustre tie you own in three words.
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 28, 2013
@jackbuckby What's the smallest mouse you've never kicked?
— Craig Sinclair (@craigsinclair) February 28, 2013
