Comments on: Owen Hatherley is the New Statesman’s Dilpazier Aslam (UPDATE: No, he isn’t really)

By: richwill

richwill — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:11:51 +0000

I used to be in the SWP and have limited respect for the organisation now as it happens – but a lot of you people on this site are clearly motivated much more by bitter hatred of the left than any other political sentiment. Any sense of outrage or even distaste at injustice and inequality seems to be curiously absent from all of the site’s posts, just pages and pages of nastiness, smallmindedness, sneering and backbiting. An fetid sectarian swamp. Was that the original idea for the site? You are, to coin a phrase, worse than the Sparts! Go read a *book* or something…

By: simon smith

simon smith — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:53:04 +0000

what an embarrassing, lying, obsessive and unbalanced post – as well as many of the comments.

By: Larry Gambone

Larry Gambone — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:49:03 +0000

As an anarcho-syndicalist, I am not a member or ally of the SWP or any of its overseas sympathizing parties. Furthermore, I am in disagreement with its tactics. However, to characterize the SWP as “totalitarian” or wanting to “establish a dictatorship” is arrant nonsense. This sort of lying bombast is in itself part of the Big Lie Technique, which was used by Stalin and Hitler – genuine totalitarians. I should add that I wasn’t born yesterday – having 43 years of activism under my belt and have had experience with members of the International Socialist Tendency – even having briefly been a member of the Canadian group IS.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:29:58 +0000

Well, as I said, Mr Rosen: you did have the material to criticise your critics’ poetry when they were talking about Zionism, as some of the criticism of you was in the form of counterpoems. I wrote a couple myself—I think one was called Dear Socialist Worker, and the other was called, I think, Flags of Peace. Brownie may also have written some, if I remember. They are on the old site, which is inaccessible, however. So you could have made use of them as slagging material at the time, if you’d so desired—pointing out their hideous metrical deficiencies, their lopsided metaphors, their incongruous metonymy, their clunking harmonies or inappropriate sweetness in handling a dissonant theme, concluding, perhaps, that, by the little that now satisfies spirit, we are able to measure the extent of its loss, or something.

I don’t have any dead children, though, but I don’t think using that against you in a political debate is of the same order as using against you poems in which you “contextualise” right-wing terrorism, and treat attacks on repressive state structures as if they were attacks on the people those same state structures dominate and subdue—in which, in short, you do some of the ideological propaganda work of right-wing terrorism and those repressive state forces for them.

The person who does the first, bringing in the topic of your dead son as a weapon against you in a political debate, makes sufficient criticism of their own level of moral development, for all to see quite clearly, it seems to me.

By: Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:11:28 +0000

I do, I do, I do.

By: Andrew Adams

Andrew Adams — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:03:27 +0000

Oh, and you really, really don’t want to read my poetry.

By: Andrew Adams

Andrew Adams — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:01:23 +0000

Michael,

the problem is though that as a well known writer and broadcaster you will always be at a disadvantage in this respect because there is already so much information about you in the public domain.

I blog and comment under my real name but I’m not sure that you would be much better off knowing this if we were in a discussion because there really isn’t much information out there about me to find (I’m not the Andrew Adams who was wrongly convicted of murder and then released by the way). Therefore I don’t see much difference between myself and someone like Modernity who uses a pseudonym but at least does so consistently. I agree with Brownie in that sense – it’s not the anonymity per se that is important so much as people who change identities.

It’s a double edged sword though – if you want to vent your spleen on a particular subject then your high profile means you have more outlets than many of us and that people are more likely to listen.

By: Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:10:58 +0000

KB player, I think bringing all of it is fair game…if I could do the same to you. I mean, I’d love to know what you’re poetry is like and if your son died. Then, when we argued about zionism or the swp I could say, ‘And another thing…KP Player’s poetry is shit and his son died.’ I’d like to do that but you spoilsports don’t give me the chance.

By: KB Player

KB Player — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:24:12 +0000

Well, I think bringing Michael Rosen’s poetry into a debate is fair game, as bringing in his essays or articles would be. But it’s totally shameful bringing his dead son or any part of his personal life into arguments on a blog.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:05:50 +0000

Or a foot.