Ash Sarkar on the News Agents - the backpedaling continues...

[mantaraya]

Apparently identity politics is silly and divisive. According to Ash, oppression is not a competition and the left is eating itself up accommodating to "woke" victimhood. Any quotes that sound like she has been pushing this line of thinking have been taken out of context.

On trans - this is very unlikely to be in anyone's top 3 issues politically so we should all just shut up about it and focus on the real problems (please ignore the fact that Ash has been banging this drum for years). Oh and the reason the left (i.e. Ash) has supported (ridiculous) things like transwomen in women's sports is because there aren't enough trans political organisations leading the way so they're just trying to do the right thing and defend vulnerable trans people. Ahem.

Quite amusing to listen to just for the various attempts at arse covering. I only wish I could have been the interviewer!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tdUDCkv3oc3kBjN9VkzGI

Oh, that's interesting.

Enjoyed this book review by Kathleen Stock: https://unherd.com/2025/02/trying-to-forgive-ash-sarkar/

Ash Mark II has a serious book to punt, in which she argues that identity politics is a divisive cul de sac making anti-capitalist revolution further away than ever. Hear her out: the political culture of this country has been harmed by self-interested Leftist pundits using social media to commodify whatever currently fashionable identity characteristics nature gave them, spawning rancour instead of fostering solidarity among the working class.

That book quote is possibly the most un self aware thing I have ever read! It's something I could imagine Owen Jones parroting as well. Both of them have been the absolute pinnacle of self interested Leftist pundits spawning rancour on social media. I am agog that she had the front to say that. Her publisher must have been rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of all the publicity the book would get from the complete lack of self awareness demonstrated. She is ridiculous.

'They don’t have to agree, but they do have to stop laughing and pointing'

Good point from Kathleen Stock. But I don't know if Novara media types are capable.

I suppose this is just the glimmer of realisation dawning. They see that their current approach is losing hard - morally, logically, legally, and in popularity.

But having spent ten years congratulating themselves for being on the RSOH, they are still unable to grasp that history is more complex and nuanced and less black and white than they'd asserted. Yet to acknowledge their own failures.

Either they need to catch up very fast, and develop a bit of self awareness, or they'll render themselves irrelevant forever.

So, those are Ash Sarkar's Fully Automated Luxury Beliefs. Not only are they lacking any critical thinking contribution from her, but those excerpts alone are full of hostages to fortune. When everyone else is going through their social media to delete "inconvenient" posts over the next few years, Sarkar will need to be buying up copies of her book on eBay, trawling round the charity shops, and rumaging through the bargain bins in The Works.

Oof. Yes. Of course the time lag between writing a book and publishing it can cause more issues when writing on a situation that is morphing in front of your eyes.

She'll have signed this off last year.

And everything's changed.

Don't make me feel sorry for her!

' (In the book, she says she was “not exactly thrilled” about [Roger Hallam's] insult; on the pod, she said she thought it was funny.)'

Last year, she was still on 'indignant' setting. Now, she's backpedalling to 'I was only joking'.

Give it a few years or so and she'll be praising Venice Allan's stickers as a bold and brash feminist statement.

A single article by Rowling forces government ministers to respond in a conciliatory tone.

What the fuck is she talking about??

I've not read the whole extract but I imagine she means the article Rowling wrote for The Times just before the general election last year.

"A single article by Rowling forces government ministers to respond in a conciliatory tone. These views, of course, are well within her rights to express. And nobody deserves threats, abuse or harassment for participating in live political discussions online."
"What's striking here is how clearly we can see a particularly famous and wealthy person wielding an outsize influence on the policymaking landscape. Despite presenting themselves as under attack by trans activists and their allies, the likes of J. K. Rowling are well networked, well placed and more widely represented than their opponents."

More widely represented, what on earth is she talking about, you can count the celebrities who feel able to represent GC views on your fingers. Its not a fringe position but in celebrity or media I don't think that you would say GC are more well networked, well placed and widely represented than their "opponents"

Also why focus on Rowling, why not use the book to call out someone like David Tennant for his comments on Kemi Badenoch, oh thats right, DT still has the "correct" views.

I preferred KS's review to The Times review, which I thought had a nasty oooh-look-how-clever-I-am tone e.g. it starts out with 'Ash Sarkar, a two-legged viral outrage generator' which suggested that what followed would be unencumbered by any attempt at objectivity; and I don't like that in a book review. But that's just me ..

KS quotes AS's 'brushing over' of the October 7th massacres:
"the attacks killed some 1,200 people, and involved roughly 240 individuals being taken hostage.”
[the use of the words 'some', 'roughly' , and 'individuals' rather than 'people' is interesting].

In the extracts kindly posted by eatfigs there's another example of 'brushing over': after a paragraph denouncing JKR, there is what reads like a grudging postscript:
These views, of course, are well within her rights to express. And nobody deserves threats, abuse or harassment for participating in live political discussions online.

AS doesn't detail the threats, abuse and harassment of JKR which include countless death threats, and again the choice of words is interesting: 'of course, nobody deserves threats..'. It's like AS can't bring herself to say unequivocally 'JKR does not deserve threats, abuse or harassment', instead it's 'nobody deserves..' with an implied 'not even that awful JKR woman!'

Neither review picked up on the thoroughly-discredited 1.7% intersex stat, I notice. Writers are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own statistics, and inaccurate stats are an open goal for reviewers.

In fact, I think that if you really want to diss a writer, pointing out an egregious factual error is even more damning that calling them 'a two-legged viral outrage generator'.
But again, that's just me..

This is how I see her too.

Just saw an extract someone posted on twitter where she talks about her last few amazon purchases

"Is Amazon really a retailer? Sure, there are Amazon-branded products like cat food and shampoos. But they make up a small percentage of its sales. It me take you through my last few orders. Amazon don’t make the tub of gochujang I bought yesterday (CJ Haechandle, or the food factory they contract, does that). They don’t make the hydrating face mist I ordered (BYOMA, or the factory they contract, does that). They don’t make the lightbulbs I purchased for the bathroom, the D-lock I got for my bike or the sewing kit I bought with every intention of learning how to darn. These physical goods are just the tip of Amazon’s revenue iceberg. Amazon Web Services – which makes up nearly a third of the world’s cloud infrastructure market – made more than $25 billion in the twelve months leading up to April 2024. As Yanis Varoufakis argues in Technofeudalism, these companies who actually make the products you buy on Amazon or Alibaba have the status of vassal subjects beneath their lord or king. He calls the likes of Amazon, or the Apple App Store, ‘cloudalists’ – they control the space in which commercial transactions take place, and skim off most of the profit margin in the form of rent. He writes that these tech giants operate ‘digital fiefdoms’: today, ‘conventional capitalist manufacturers increasingly have no option but to sell their goods at the discretion of the cloudalists, paying them a fee for the privilege, developing a relationship with them no different to that of vassals vis-à-vis their feudal overlords.’"

I have a friend who is really firm in her political beliefs that amazon treat their workers badly and Jeff Bezos is awful, as a result she doesn't shop from amazon. Ash is all fur coat an no knickers in her politics if she can't even give up the convenience of amazon. Can you imagine what Marx would have made of Ash

Thoroughly enjoyed that, thank you!

Can you imagine what Marx would have made of Ash

Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your hydrating face mists

I followed this series of events up.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11793005/How-chat-ladies-plunged-Tory-councillor-clash-trans-rights-womens-safety.html

Ruby Sampson, Tory councillor, on her encounter with a transwoman:

'It was as she moved to the door to leave that it happened. I remarked that we had no choice but to awkwardly shake our hands dry, and she turned to me and replied: 'I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis.' With that, she disappeared.
Until this, our conversation had been quite positive and pleasant.
Now I was frozen to the spot in shock. There is no doubt in my mind that this was a threat of sorts.'

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/trans-woman-daily-mail-article-1234690463/

Sophie McAllister, transwoman activist, on her version of the encounter:

“Towards the end, I was trying to use the hand dryer. It was terrible and she was like ‘We’ll have to shake,’” Sophie says. “I said ‘Oh, I’ll just wipe my hands on my jeans’ and I left.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/itcouldhappenhere/comments/18jdy1w/sophie_from_mars_abuse_allegations/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18h7teb/sophie_from_mars_responds_to_a_letter_from_her

Allegations of abuse letter signed by five 'transwomen'.

'Sophia 'Sophie from Mars' McAllister Is A Danger to Other Trans Women

We are a group of trans women who have been harmed by Sophie. Some of us have dated and been in relationships with her, many others have hooked up with her. She has been abusive, controlling, indifferent to our consent or its absence, and catastrophically selfish. Some of us have been permanently physically scarred. Some of us have had drugs pressured on us. All of us have been left seriously hurt, both emotionally and physically.
We believe this represents a pattern of calculated, intentional abuse by Sophie, and that there may be many more people she has harmed.'

I believe Ruby.

To be fair to Ash Sarkar, the fact that the man she defended turns out to be an abusive, manipulative predator does not necessarily mean that he intimidated or abused Ruby Sampson.

But you'd think she may pause before leaping to the defense of a man accused of intimidating a woman.

Ash assumes that if a man is in the women's toilets he is in good faith, by virtue of his presence. This is a very stupid position to take.

At the very least, Ash, try to avoid sneering at women making allegations.

As Yanis Varoufakis argues in Technofeudalism,

Hahahaha.
Yanis "hang on in there, sisters" Varoufakis

Sarkar minimising the threat felt by a female entirely consistent with the pattern of "B10" dismissing an attempted rape by an aquaintance of Novaras' hangers-on as, and I quote "consensual knife play" 👺🤐

What was that about @Lalgarh?

Since then, the Prime Minister has rolled back on trans rights, promising to exclude trans women from female hospital wards and saying that trans women don't have the right to use female toilets. Politicians may get bullied, but it's minorities who pay the price.

Thanks for quoting all of this, @eatfigs. This is such a perfect example of the twisted, bad-faith language games the woolly TRAs play. "Rolled back on trans rights", the examples being that male-bodied people can't use female hospital wards and female toilets. They aren't being excluded from accessing health care or toilets in ANY WAY - they just aren't being allowed to use private spaces that have traditionally, for myriad good reasons, been kept sex-segregated.

But with language like "rolling back on trans rights", of COURSE it sounds like the PM is being so bigoted and meany-weany. Fucking hell.

In 2017, Aaron Bastani went on a podcast with George Galloway.

Several readers/ believers heavily invested in Novara and it's core politics reacted with fury in light of his rape apologism.

It triggered a backlash that included one woman's account of an attempted rape by one of the clique of self regarding hipsters in Novaras' orbit. Details will send you down several rabbit holes and quite a few have now deleted their accounts.

Reddit mentions it here

https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyTube/comments/gxdkkh/whats_this_boycott_novara_about_from_the_open/?rdt=55709

Which leads you to a Facebook posting that is still available

m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid06yPVRYAZiPxjhH73VKfT1MdgXnxtTVk7gvqBSLnTgF1r2d2umATD3cQGniTCRt9el&id=1209325983

I'll paste screenshots

Ok so I can't take screenshots of the Reddit.

Here are screenshots of the selected tweets that Facebook page linked to

Relating to items 1) 2) 3)

These ppl by the way can't be dismissed by that clique as Dreadful Tories. She was urging ppl to donate to Sisters Uncut, who are Trans inclusive and are involved in that women's march being held. Very much Right Side Of History