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

I was just coming to post a link to that! As usual, DocStock nails it. This extract sums it up for me:

The young Corbynite Left — including Sarkar, obviously — swam with the identitarian wave surging across the Atlantic, not against. They made individualistic grievance politics and competitive victimhood fashionable in a quest for attention, while pretending to themselves it was selfless. Billionaires, centrist politicians, and Oxbridge academics realised they, too, could cheaply rebrand as moral heroes via a few superficial gestures involving rainbows and black squares without changing anything fundamental. In working-class and lower middle-class public minds, various factions from Corbynite to Blairite started to morph into one hypocritical, pontificating, reality-averse blob.

The creatures outside looked from Corbynite to Blairite, and from Blairite to Corbynite, and from Magic Grandpa to the Starmerbot; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Just agog that she shops at Amazon. Casually propping up the tech oligarchy while lecturing the plebs on how to do socialism.

Just agog that she shops at Amazon. Casually propping up the tech oligarchy while lecturing the plebs on how to do socialism.

Surely you can't expect the luxury communists to survive without hand delivered cut price gochujang. She lives in London, it's not like there's Asian food shops on every street...oh wait.

It wasn't even the young Corbynite Left. The overwhelmingly White, middle aged middle class wealthy intellectual elite jumped enthusiastically into this because it was a way they could pretend to be good people while clinging onto their privilege and not doing anything to change it when they could.

Exactly. What happened to 'From each according to their ability, to each according to their need'? She has the ability to get her crap from local shops on the high street but chooses to give one of the biggest tax avoiding multinationals her money? I thought she was ' Literally a communist'.

I think this might have been one of the tenets of Aaron Bastanis creed of "luxury communism"

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

Thank you. Shocked face.

She's literally a communist you know...

That's true, and I think the reasons are fairly straightforward. There are a lot of people in the public realm - in politics, academia, and journalism - who are privileged people, given opportunities and advantages that are denied to most. Identity politics presents ways of deflecting attention away the structural foundations of privilege. So, if you're a journalist, you "admit" that you possess white privilege, which is used to explain your relative advantage in society, and that diverts attention away from the fact that your employment and benefits come from having the right background, or going to the right university, or knowing the right people, or whatever.

We have a very significant problem in the modern world of privilege choking out talent in many professions; and identity politics has been used, not to challenge this, but to reinforce this.

Couldn't agree more.

Yes. Perform penance for whiteness, which really can't be changed, to divert attention from privilege like money and connections, which is completely malleable and could actually be surrendered.

So one can be very apologetic, and do public penance, while continuing to enjoy all the benefits of privilege. A sort of modern religious favours system.

Cripes. That would explain why whole groups of privileged people get stuck in a reinforcing circle of penance and privilege checking, while remaining persistently unaware of the pressures facing many if not most people.

So some forms of privilege can be used as convenient diversionary decoys.

Ash Sarkar interview Judith Butler (again) www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/judith-butler-whos-afraid-of-gender/

Well in fairness to AS, it takes guts to attempt to 'interview' JB. Good luck with that, Ash!🤔

I think I can confidently predict that there will be no demonstrations or attempts to stop them speak. We very much want to hear what they have to say...

Poor Ash! Where does she go from here? I mean it’s hard enough to gracefully admit you backed the wrong horse in the race, but how embarrassing to have it pointed out that what you were backing wasn’t even a horse but a wonky donkey with three legs.

An immediate retirement from the written word in any form , and a shedload of head size paper bags to hide inside is my advice.

If it is anything like the previous interview there will be lots of swerving by JB and fan-girling from AS. I was genuinely interested in finding out what JB had to say but was shocked at her poor performance. I guess even a big brain cannot defend 'trans' rights' > women's rights

I misread 'swerving by JB' as 'swearing' - 😂 That would be fun, if in the middle of one of her answers she said 'Oh, fuck this shit, I'm tired of being obtuse and verbose - see, I can't even stop myself now, 'obtuse and verbose' !'

💯 this. It's all very ' Let's talk about White Privilege and why White working class boys are equally as privileged as me because they are White (but they don't talk about how privileged they are so they're probably racist like their uneducated parents) but dont talk about me offering unpaid internships in the media that only my friends children can afford to do or my enormous London townhouse that allows my kids to go to a good state school or my Coke parties where I ignore the human and environmental destruction caused by the International drug trade. We're not racist because we respect 'Brown people'. But they must behave as we expect 'Brown people' to behave- as the oppressed and poor that we have to patronise with our superior Leftist thinking. If any of them are conservative, poor them. Too stupid to form their own opinions.

This reminds me of the video posted a few days ago which was a very interesting discussion about wokeness in advertising - more than that really, but that was part of it.

One of the things discussed was that the background of people in advertising was just very narrow - university educated, professional parents, etc. And, among the non-white people, something like 80% were privately educated. The man being interviewed said "differernt coloured toffs" to describe them.

Id politics doesn't challenge our social set up, and it doesn't say that working class people should be respected and have fair wages and political empowerment. Things that are politically actionable, unlike "whiteness".

It's 'noblesse oblige'.

Support the 'most marginalised' because they aren't a threat.

I think the underlying problem there is that they have misidentified privaledge.

It's not tied to race, directly, that's a correlation to some extent. But depending on a lot of other things, someone's whiteness can also be related to their low social status and poverty and lack of opportunity. Others don't see that status in the person's skin colour, but they do see it in a million other things, their accent, their clothing, the way they interact, where they live. Most 12 year olds can pick out who is a member of the elite and who belongs to the underclass even if they can't say why.

I'd be interested in seeing that, do you know where it was posted?

I work with advertisers and marketeers a lot (adjacent industry) and I can attest to this.

The other thing that I've started to notice in this/my industry is the absolute devotion to anything new and shiny. There's never any thought given to whether that's good for society as a whole, in marketing, newness is an undisputed value in itself. So the trans narrative delivers for them on multiple fronts.

💯 this. It's all very ' Let's talk about White Privilege and why White working class boys are equally as privileged as me because they are White (but they don't talk about how privileged they are so they're probably racist like their uneducated parents) but dont talk about me offering unpaid internships in the media that only my friends children can afford to do or my enormous London townhouse that allows my kids to go to a good state school or my Coke parties where I ignore the human and environmental destruction caused by the International drug trade. We're not racist because we respect 'Brown people'. But they must behave as we expect 'Brown people' to behave- as the oppressed and poor that we have to patronise with our superior Leftist thinking. If any of them are conservative, poor them. Too stupid to form their own opinions.

🎯