Laurie Penny; The Left-Wing Littlejohn by Nick Bryans
Black. Like the state the country is in under Cameron. Attention to detail, that.
Sometimes it’s not enough to simply report the news. If I say that 8% of the population are immigrants, most people will invariable think ‘oh right, that’s interesting’, then get on with their day. However, when this figure is presented under the headline ‘4.8 MILLION IMMIGRANTS FLOCK THROUGH BORDER TO STEAL JOBS’, then instantly you have large swaths of the country going ape-shit about trivial nonsense like their parents fighting in the war and something about how they’ve paid taxes and, erm, yeah.
It’s a winning formula; Richard Littlejohn is the highest paid UK journalist (well, actually he’s based in Florida, so quite how he can see Britain going to the dogs is beyond me, but there you go) and articles by him in March of this year included:
- Who’s the Wally with the Golly?
and
- Why my wife’s PoW granddad wouldn’t mark a minute’s silence for the Japanese
It’s unfiltered, prime-cut, rabble rousing bullshit. Just take his current article on David Cameron’s ill-advised and sexist comments in the House of Commons, which opens with this sentence;
Frankly, I don’t know who’s worse — those po-faced Leftie birds who go ballistic if you call them ‘luv’ or the pinny-whipped menfolk who leap to their defence.
Truly stunning.
But why is it that all these wind-up merchants tend to be right wing? The list of right-wing shock jocks is endless; James Delingpole, Melanie Phillips, Jeremy Clarkson etc, but why aren’t there sensationalists on the left? I’ve met some people with left-wing viewpoints in my time who were spectacularly dense, why is no-one tapping into this market?
Well someone has; step forward, Laurie Penny.
The majority of Penny’s output is reactionary bullshit for the left, which is almost identikit to Littlejohn’s work; They both believe the country is fucked, but just replace immigrants, homosexuals and political correctness for Tory MPs.
It’s got it all; hyperbole, hypocrisy; the works.
In the past, Laurie has received public scorn following articles she wrote on the March 26th protests which romanticised violence, and advertising for an intern that paid less than the national minimum wage. In her latest issue, Pennie has her sights on the Royal Wedding, which is just the fucking apocalypse, according to her. Not an innocuous wedding between two people with ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING POWER WHATSOEVER, who spend most of their time been photographed at village fetes.
This is England in 2011: as the country gears up for the Wedding of Mass Distraction, police up and down the country have been bursting into squatted social centres and private homes, arresting anyone whom they suspect of having connections with the anti-cuts movement, on the pretext of preventing disorder at the happy event – sometimes seizing known protestors on the street or from their cars.
This is the basic plot of most of her work; scare-mongering about the state and society based on weak facts and rumour whilst pontificating in such a romanticised way, that it seems like an excerpt from a George Orwell novel. Britain, in general, is a fucking boring country. Nothing happens, really. There are no revolutions, political corruption is not much more than a duck house and a few bags of ready salted crisps, and freedom of the press is used for such things as Page 3 and Sudoku. This isn’t Syria, this isn’t pre-revolutionary Russia. It’s Britain. We have Pimms. And Countryfile. And Celebrity Hole in The Wall. That’s about it. So anything slightly out of ordinary thing that happens has to be blown up to the nth degree.
Oh yeah, we've got a special brand of sauce as well. That's something exciting, right?
She pissed off because;
Despite the British press devoting weeks of coverage to these ‘pre-arrests,’ and despite rampant speculation over the evil plots these dangerous radicals might be concocting to spoil the day, most actual anarchists in the UK couldn’t care less about one faceless aristocrat marrying another.
SO WHY ARE YOU WRITING AN ARTICLE ON IT THEN!
This is a nation and a people undergoing a profound disturbance of identity. A few streets away from the Brittania Day celebrations, as the power of flash dance was employed to celebrate the Empire, more squat raids were taking place in Brighton.
Now I consider myself a quite perceptive guy, but what in god’s name is the link between the two? Laurie explains;
The effect created is a narrative whereby the police are on one side, bravely protecting the royal family, the union jack, bunting, teacakes and traditional flag-waving deference, and on the other side is a mysterious army of dangerous yobs who deserve to be arrested for any crimes they might possibly be thinking about committing.
Reading between the lines, Penny is pissed off that squatters are being arrested instead of bunting and teacakes? Can you arrest bunting and teacakes?
She perhaps does have a point when she discusses the questionable nature of pre-arresting protesters linked to anti-cuts demos. But for her, it’s not just enough to say this, she has phrase the point in this dystopian POLICE TERRRA hyperbole of her’s, where the police are shills for the utterly feckless Royal family, and innocent people are being arrested for thought crimes! When someone bases their political rhetoric on the hit Tom Cruise film ‘Minority Report’, you have to worry slightly.
The assembled supporters scattered: I had seen enough, and got on a bus back through central London.
Penny, here, taking the ‘Bear Grylls’ approach to squatter support.
This whole article was basically a sensationalised account over how the police were just fucking tools of the state, when in reality they are, erm, employees of the state? It’s hard to actually gauge what Penny’s argument is. It’s the sort of hyper-active bullshit that easily convinced teenagers come out with after listening to Billy Bragg in dark rooms. There seems to be this concept that if anyone on the right exaggerates ANYTHING to do with crime, immigration etc then they are just the biggest bastards in the Western World, whereas Penny can generalise the motivates on the entire fucking police force, and she’s the voice of truth.
Stuff like this boils my piss far more than Littlejohn et al. I consider myself staunchly left-wing, so I feel like Penny is indirectly representing me, yet the hypocrisy she and her cronies come out with is beyond parody. She writes for the Guardian who are horrendous tax dodgers, then claims that tax evaders are everything that is wrong with western society. Hypocrisy on that unashamed scale is page 1 of the Littlejohn book of ‘how to be a columnist’!
'First, we tear up the bunting. Then, we tear up the state.'
Penny hates the Royal Wedding so much that she devotes an article solely to it, devoid of this piss-poor ‘squatters’ sub text. I should add, the ‘most actual anarchists in the UK couldn’t care less about one faceless aristocrat marrying another’ Royal Wedding.
Entitled ‘Royal wedding cheerleaders want to drag us back to the days of deference’, Penny explains the horrors of what these archaic, cheerleading bastards want to expose us to;
This bric-a-brac of old-fashioned Englishness does not include a polio float or imprisonment for homosexuals, but there will be a Chas-and-Dave tribute band.
So, erm, it’s not really dragging us back to the days of deference. Is it. It’s Sideboard Song and triangular flags. You’re just sort of, lying, and exaggerating, really.
It’s at this stage where Pennie takes two spoons full of crazy syrup and believes that an innocuous wedding that most actual anarchists in the UK couldn’t care less about will cause the downfall of all that is good about the UK.
Other street parties in the capital will be distributing T-shirts printed with the omnipresent “Keep Calm and Carry On” design, the “ironic” wartime propaganda poster that now infests the chinaware of the middle classes, reminding us that fortitude in the face of government-imposed austerity is just like fortitude in the face of Nazi invasion.
The Second World War is reserved for special reverence, because this is the last moment in recent British history where we can be sure that our country was unmitigatedly on the side of good. Most of us want to be able to feel proud of being British, but that desire is being ruthlessly exploited in the quest for public acquiescence to enforced austerity.
It’s a wedding. It’s tea cakes. It’s Chas & Dave. For your own health, Laurie, chill the fuck out.
Laurie writes with all the composure and balance of a jelly on a bouncy castle. She keeps claiming the wedding is irrelevant, and no-one gives a shit, yet at the same time claims that it’s one of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse. It can’t be both!
She’s not to be stopped there, though! Just incase people haven’t read either of her dreary blog posts, she uses that nifty Twitter thing to spout her bullshit hyperbole – but in 140 characters or less!
.
.
.
.
It’s beyond belief.
I understand people disliking the idea of class, and how the Royals encapsulate this, but f**king hell, grow up. Charles spends his days making pretentious biscuits and talking to trees, Harry is in the army and William unveils lifeboats in Wales. Hardly like we need to smash these plums for DA REVALUUSHIN!!!
As has been discussed a thousand times, the money they make far outweighs the cost. I realise this doesn’t overcome the original issue, but fuck it, it’s not the 1500s. Look at the House of Lords, complied of hereditary peers and people with mates in high places, it’s just a mishmash of nepotism and back-handers and has an actual say in the legislative process. If you hate class, target this, ffs!
r.e the wedding; man wants to marry girl he met at uni. Man had no say in the family he was born into. People are interest because people like every branch of celeb culture in the UK. Let him have his day.
I have a theory that Laurie Penny is actually brilliant satire. When I read her work, I feel sorry for moderate Tory voters that I would often condemn due to me basing my own mental manifestation of a ‘tory voter’ on the Daily Mail. But actually, Laurie’s column could be a thinly veiled attempt to bring us all together, and show us that there are bullshit merchants all over the place, and we shouldn’t base our opinion of others on them. Probably not, though.
A time will come where these so called ‘opinion’ columns have to stop. Whether it’s Littlejohn on the right or Penny on the left, it’s sets a horrible example to young writers that ‘hey, if you write sensationalist, reactionary bullshit with the sole intention to stir up social strife, then you’ll go far!’ Yes, people can watch the many hours of rolling broadcasting for the ‘news’, but that doesn’t give you carte-blanche to write pure shit. We need to get to a stage where regardless of your opinion; the facts are presented in their entirety, regardless of your political persuasion. Or as this person put it;
Sorry, but journalism isn’t about painting a rosy picture. The British people deserve the truth, and real reasons for hope, not fairytales.
I totally agree.
Oh, and the author of this quote? Laurie fucking Penny.
The mind boggles.
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Fantastic stuff. And add to that on Question Time the cringeworthy, out-of-context ‘calm down, dear’ line that just about summed up her world-weary, self-pitying conviction that whenever she was contradicted it was an act of sexism rather than correction.
Can I just say (although Penny isn’t the only offender) how much ‘Scotland’ hates being lumped together as ‘Scotland’. It’s a whole, actual, real-life country, with millions of people, big cities, small towns, rural areas and all the rest of it. Just like England. (Though not like London, which seems to be Penny’s entire frame of reference for ‘national identity’.) We weren’t all “savagely indifferent”. Personally, I was quite excited, meself. Had two cups of tea and everything.
“Penny, here, taking the ‘Bear Grylls’ approach to squatter support”, brilliant line. But what’s wrong with having Billy Bragg in a dark room, oh, wait…
Nice piece, Nick, and I agree with every word. Apart from the spelling of Delingpole.
Sorry James, our bad. We got Clarkson’s name right though, and isn’t that the important thing?
I keep asking her how the student “uprising” is going.
She doesn’t reply…
I gather you feel quite strongly about it then?? :o)
Seriously: Well written and totally fair. And thats coming from someone on the right!
Exactly. I do quite like the way Penny sends the right & the libertarian loonspuds into paroxysms of crossness, but the trouble is she’s yet another well-educated, middle-class, not-going-to-be affected-by-the-things-she-rails-against chancer who has set herself up as representative of the people who stand to lose from the measures the coalition government are busy implementing. And the voices that should be being heard are drowned out by her relentless, excitable hyperbole. She represents herself, primarily, and it’s a nice little career she’s building – ultimate aim, no doubt, like the unspeakable Aaron Porter, a Labour seat in parliament.
Goodness. Well apart from the factual errors and capital letters this is an interesting piece, glad you’ve got it off your chest.
As they say, if Tories are getting mad at her, she must be doing something right.
As a moderate Tory* I completely agree. Also, it’s a highly amusing article.
* But not one who reads the Daily Mail. Guardian and Telegraph, thank you.
I tweeted Laurie and suggested she was in fact a situationist art project. So your theory about her being satire struck me. It’s not for real. Is it? Anyway, she didn’t reply. I don’t blame her.
As a fellow man of the left I completely agree. It’s embarrassing to be honest, she absolutely loves herself. Her brand of sensationalism is definitely a modern, Guardian reading liberal one; wordy and unbelievably self-righteous.
Laurie Penny is just an opportunist who should get a real job and contribute to the real economy. Why give her the oxygen of publicity.
@citizansix
“Goodness. Well apart from the factual errors and capital letters this is an interesting piece, glad you’ve got it off your chest.
As they say, if Tories are getting mad at her, she must be doing something right.”
So you’ve deduced for the article that we’re factually incorrect Tories?
Brilliant.
(Oh, and I love capital letters. Would have written the whole article in BLOCK CAPS if the editor had let me. Which he didn’t).
“savagely indifferent”.
Brilliant. I wonder what that looks like.
Is she a bit twisted in the noggin? It seems like it to me, she does a lot of screaming about the failings of the world, but really she just wants people to pay attention to her.
I bet she’s really p*ssed off about being pretty too.
Even as a detestable student commie waster I find Penny utterly vomit-inducing. Ignore this blog, go and read her gonzo articles about March for the Alternative or her average day – it’s like one of Jack London’s wet dreams crossed with the sort of free magazine they have lying around in Pret A Manger.
…the worst thing is the fawning attitude of the lefty-pervs on Twitter. Then again, if you had to have a pin-up of one person from the lefty-commentariat…
Whatever else you think about Ms Penny, she’s twenty four. Most of us are not at our most clueful when we’re twenty four.
Littlejohn, on the other hand, has left it a bit late to use that excuse.
@JennieKermode
“Whatever else you think about Ms Penny, she’s twenty four. Most of us are not at our most clueful when we’re twenty four.”
I’m 22. Two years younger than Penny. I also haven’t had an Oxford Education like Penny. Yet, I can still write in a fairly bi-partisan manner.
People need to stop making excuses for her. She’s hardly a ‘novice’. She started her blog 4 years ago, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Orwellian prize. She has a column for the New Statesman and regularly contributes to The Guardian. She also had her own special ‘Dispatchers’ episode on channel 4 and has made appearances on a number of terrestrial TV shows. She’s even got a book out. She is an ‘accomplished’ journalist.
Great article, razor sharp, and very funny, but with an underlying sadness at the recognition that our political culture is dominated by screeching morons on left and right.
Any chance of a link? That’s okay, I’ve found it…
First things first: Penny doesn’t write for the Guardian; she writes for the Staggers, though doubtless she’s had stuff published in the Grauniad. I’m not sure of the New Statesman’s tax arrangements, but in any case I imagine Laurie is a freelancer.
Your article makes me sad. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t irked by the fact that the voice of many of the Left’s young guns is often of a plummy timbre and somewhat self-righteous tone, inflected with a hint of self-mythologising. It’s true also that Laurie (too) often writes from a London perspective – a complaint about the media hardly peculiar to her efforts.
But in surfing along your own wave of screeching hyperbole, you’ve failed to take her work at its merits. Penny’s oeuvre is not dispassionate news reporting but personalised reportage, writing about the world as she sees it. As somebody perpetually frustrated with the right-leaning tilt of England’s mainstream press, I find Penny’s observations of the subtle forces of control at work within society astute and resonant with my own less well-articulated view. As someone who also claims to be on “the Left”, it’s a shame that you allowed the style of her writing to overshadow its message. (I too find her tone a tad self-important – though it’s not as if she’s exactly alone among journalists in having this accusation levelled at her.)
As for your assertion that “it’s just a wedding”, well, that is how you might see it. Others may describe it as a vapid tourist spectacle; a reminder of what makes Britain Great; an assertion of colonial power; a fairy tale romance; etc, etc.
I could go on, but I’m aware it’s your party, so in summing up: she ain’t perfect, but I’m glad we’ve got her.
I’d give her one.
@SWCarver
“But in surfing along your own wave of screeching hyperbole, you’ve failed to take her work at its merits. Penny’s oeuvre is not dispassionate news reporting but personalised reportage, writing about the world as she sees it.”
I don’t even know what this sentence means. You say that her body of work concerns ‘personalised reportage, writing about the world as she sees it’, which would then give her licence to write anything. Under that caveat, the aforementioned Littlejohn could claim that we will have Sharia Law in Britain, then if anyone tries to pull him up on it, he could just state he’s ‘writing about the world as he sees it’. She makes accusations about how the Tories want to send us back to the days of deference, then contradicts herself within the next paragraph. You say you’re happy to have her, why? Because she can lie and make you think that some sort of revolution is coming, and we can party like it’s Berlin 1989?
“As someone who also claims to be on “the Left”, it’s a shame that you allowed the style of her writing to overshadow its message. (I too find her tone a tad self-important – though it’s not as if she’s exactly alone among journalists in having this accusation levelled at her.)”
But I don’t agree with her message. She observes that pre-arrests are going on before the Royal Wedding. Yes. I agree. I think it’s wrong. But then she deduces from this that The ENTIRE POLICE FORCE AND GOVERNMENT are striving to create a dystopia that purges the streets of ‘free thinkers’. Which is just a totally unsubstantiated opinion, and it’s sole purpose is to scare people, a bit like our good freind RL.
Fundamentally, if you just want to write controversial, gut-thinking/straight from the heart, ‘shock-jock’ style prose, fine. But don’t describe yourself as a ‘journalist’. Because you’re not. And if she was as assured in opinion as she seems to be, she would have responded to us, rather than blocking us on Twitter.
Major you had nothing more intelligent to say?
True; I wasn’t very happy with that sentence – it was late and my mind was numbed from having to read newspapers for a living. I suppose what I was getting at is the old Nye Bevan quote, “This is my truth; tell me yours”. Given that Laurie Penny does actually live in Britain – in London – and is the only journalist (to use that contentious term) I’ve read to report from within a kettled scrum, even you must concede that perhaps her “truth” is a tad more worth reading than the view of Littlejohn from his Florida towers.
“She makes accusations about how the Tories want to send us back to the days of deference, then contradicts herself within the next paragraph.”
I’m struggling to find the contradiction you’re referring to. In this article – http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/04/british-wedding-retro-britain – the “deference” quote, in fairness, looks like it was added by a sub. Though she does go on to say:
“Inherent in this accumulation of cultural relics is the belief that modern Britain has little to feel proud of, and less to look forward to.”
Which, I suppose, sums up her objection to the Wedding hokum and why she finds it objectionable.
A totally objective, all-encompassing journalism, though an admirable ideal, is practically impossible to achieve. What Penny is essentially doing is “reading between the lines” – peering into an event and pointing out a “truth” which is either overlooked or wilfully obscured by conventional reporting. Just as, perhaps, what you are doing is looking into a blogger’s work and finding reasons for disbelieving it.
Your “scare-mongering” accusation is intriguing: it’s a moot point whether all of us would live in less fear or get less angry about what was happening in the world if we never read newspapers. People *were* evicted from their squats, and others were arrested before committing an offence. Does it irresponsibly instil fear to report this? Is it scare-mongering to draw conclusions from it? I suppose it depends on whether you believe ideologies are constantly at work within societies or whether history is merely made up of an infinite number of unconnected events.
As for Twitter, well, I wouldn’t know about that. But I can imagine she gets a lot of shit, and your (ahem) occasionally facetious tone probably does you few favours in that regard.
This article is astonishingly complacent. Unlike Richard Littlejohn (who merely speaks the foetid contents of his brainz), Laurie actually talks to real people and stands with them on the front lines. Far from being based on rumour and ‘weak facts’, her articles are often informed by personal experience.
For example, Laurie was in the Trafalgar square kettle on 26th March. She did not romanticise violence; she simply documented the violence on both sides, but mainly instigated by the police. This is a story most media and journalists are too supine or just too detached from events to tell. I was at a meeting of protest groups last night, attended by both Laurie Penny and John McDonnell MP. The first-hand stories we heard of wrongful arrest and police intimidation were utterly terrifying. Even McDonnell had been arrested and charged with assault and battery in the past: fortunately the incident had been captured on video and it became clear that the charges were completely invented. This is a very common experience. The police lie constantly, and they spin fairy stories which the press are only too eager to regurgitate.
Hardly anyone is speaking on behalf of those people being targeted in blatantly political police operations. We are indeed becoming a police state, and the laws being deployed were nearly all passed in the last 30 years. Laurie Penny is a rare dissenting voice, welcomed by those who are otherwise largely ignored. It’s totally outrageous to compare her to the likes of reactionaries like Littlejohn.
I couldn’t agree more, she strikes me as the worst sort of middle class apologist.
Lest we forget she’s only twenty four, so has an entire career to get through sticking to this bullshit. There’s the issue though, can you really stick to this sort of vehemently left wing nonsense when you get older?
The nature of her rhetoric, that the young should be wholly funded through education by the state, that wealth and protection of wealth is wrong and that there shouldn’t really be a state (nice dichotomy there I feel) will fall apart when she realises that the money she’s earning pushes her away from the very ideals that she spouts forth…
@ChrisW
Most people agree she does raise some good points, but her opinions and conclusions are just mind-boggling.
Take her column on the student protests; she compares the student protesters to suffrages, justifies violence and vandalism, and has possible the most absurd sentence in the history of web journalism:
“The students who shattered the windows of 30 Millbank are being pursued by the police, but nobody has yet called for a witch-hunt of those responsible for the sacking of the welfare state, of public education and of social democracy in this or any other country.”
*facepalm*
It just comes across as so myopic it’s painful. There are people in Syria dying in a fight for democracy, and she has the temerity to describe Britain as a ‘police state’ because she isn’t too keen on spending cuts that every party said they’d make. It’s classic Champagne Socialism.
Oh, and if you want to know how to accurately report a protest, with balance and opinion, read this;
http://fortyshadesofgrey.blogspot.com/2011/05/brighton-may-day.html
We could probably dispatch with a lot of these fanatical half-wits if we introduced proportional representation. Mad? Maybe, but it would reduce a lot of the opportunities morons like Penny have to rail against the ‘nasty man in control’.
These people are far, far more dangerous than they look and write like. They believe what they are saying.
Great article but just one quibble; concerns over immigration isn’t reactionary. As a candidate who has stood at various recent elections that is by far (and I mean by a very very long distance) the number one topic raised on the doorstep – in relation to the impact on housing, jobs and schools. Littlejohn maybe reactionary but the subject of immigration needs urgent ‘grown-up’ discussion.
an excellent article and its so refreshing to read about the dangers of sensationalism while not also bashing the right for free!
I would question one thing though – are you sure you are left wing? Maybe you are more classic liberal (the orange party, not the Lib dems)?
Anyway – I will be reading more of your stuff – thanks ;)
Citizensix:
“As they say, if Tories are getting mad at her, she must be doing something right.”
Okay, if you insist. By that logic (sic), Cameron and Osborne are doing everything right. Agree with that? No, didn’t think so.
Think how she’ll cringe when she gets older and has to own her old words still! That’ll be her just punishment really.
“New Children’s Crusade”? She’ll cover her eyes and wish she could disappear.
Her florid, heaving prose? That’ll be good for a deep wince.
Anyway, I would like to congratulate her on well and truly beating her anorexia or bulimia or whatever her eating disorder was. She does strike one as the type to have an eating disorder, doesn’t she.
She is like a parody of Dave Spart from Private Eye (if a parody of a parody is possible).
Have you seen this article of hers?
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2009/07/07/harry-potter-and-the-fascist-ubermensch/
Proof that the loony left does indeed still exist!
There’s a few decent, potentially constructive criticisms in here, but they’re so overwhelmed by that rather pitifully self-concious sneering that always seems to characterise vaguely-left-wing criticisms of Penny that you have to squint pretty hard to see them. It’s like trying to eat a single chip out of a overflowing bowl of ketchup, which isn’t, you may have guessed, something which I all that frequently set out to do.
Great article, spot on in every respect.
@Richard Thanks for that link – a very amusing leftist deconstruction of a popular classic. Excellent.
@Finnegan You’ve put it more eloquently than I ever could. *doffs cap*
Call me a peasant, but it’s the first time I’ve come across Laurie Penny – although, having first read Cow’s piece, above, and then this, ‘The Princess and the Penny’ http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2011/05/princess-and-penny.html I can only imagine that she was either locked in a cellar as a child or denied any fatherly attention during her formative years. There was a time when journo’s were capable of satirising that which stuck in their craw – but Penny’s prefers the “I’m a irredeemably bitter bint” route to remonstration and it’s just tragic. Nature/nurture?
@Finnegan
“There’s a few decent, potentially constructive criticisms in here, but they’re so overwhelmed by that rather pitifully self-concious sneering that always seems to characterise vaguely-left-wing criticisms of Penny that you have to squint pretty hard to see them. It’s like trying to eat a single chip out of a overflowing bowl of ketchup, which isn’t, you may have guessed, something which I all that frequently set out to do.”
Describing our piece as Ketchup? Well I take that as a condiment!
Despite the saucy nature of your comment (right, that’s two Ketchup puns so far. Two. And we’re barely a couple sentences in), we’d love to hear what you feel is our ‘rather pitifully self-concious sneering’, especially considering how Laurie has just written an article on Kate Middleton, in which she stated:
“Kate Middleton is the perfect modern-day princess, in that she appears essentially void of personality; a dress-up dolly for the age of austerity. The new royal facial muscles seem to be fixed with such permanence into that lipglossed rictus of demure compliance that when she opened her mouth to speak during the televised ceremony, I actually jumped. As it transpired, all she eventually said was “I will,” as if someone had tugged a cord through the back of that custom McQueen gown to activate a voicebox of ritual acquiescence.”
Now, all jokes aside, that is a fucking deplorable way to speak about someone. We were very careful with how we talked about Laurie, we dealt strictly with her writing content and not her as a person or her background, so how you have the temerity to call us ‘pitifully self-concious’ is beyond me.
But hey, if we’ve missed some glaring examples of us at Shouting at Cows being massive douchebags in this piece, then please, highlight it. We’re not fighters, we’re lovers. And that’s a reputation we would like to keep.
I quite agree with the author of the first comment, and their assessment of her appearance on ‘Question Time.’ It was beyond ‘cringe-worthy,’ and took the typical approach of those who hold poorly thought-out viewpoints they can’t substantively defend whenever encountering criticism. Rather than admit they might possibly be incorrect, and having no adequate answer to a refutation of their position, they turn ’round and whiningly accuse those delivering the critique of being ill-mannered. This is because their positions are based more on emotionally driven bias rather than fact. Politeness, or lack thereof (as this is very often a subjective determination) is no guarantor of the validity or invalidity of an argument – full stop. I’m reasonably certain that if someone were stupid enough to assert that the Sun is geocentric on one of these programmes, people would be unanimous in their ridicule of whoever said so. Courtesy is an accidental quality in consideration of an argument; and it should be paid first to truth, to facts and reality, then to the person. In simple terms, if you say something only an utter ignorant knob would say, don’t take issue with me if I indulge in sarcasm or harsh terms when countering your silly position. Take issue, rather, with your position itself, and how you arrived at it.
Love it. I thought my intolerance of Penny Red was a fortunate side effect of the aging process, but actually its her not me. She does, however, have one particular talent – she writes succunctly, while your critique is rather rambling. And imagine if she and her ilk – Little John, Mel Phips et al – didn’t exist – would the world really be a better place?
I would like to know more of her background – I’ve seen hints her education was parentally funded, but confirmation would be…well, Diane Abbot all over again
The hysteria of this article is unmatched by anything Laurie Penny has written. If you want to criticise her by all means go ahead, but can’t you do it gracefully intelligently, and without resorting to the same techniques you accuse her of? Having read several of your articles and some of your comments online, I can already tell that if Laurie’s supposed “gimmick” is pretending to be working-class / exaggerating the issues, yours is feigning ignorance as though being incapable of understanding polysyllables is a badge of honour (see above comment, for example). Unlike SWCarver I am unwilling to apologise or translate, but I will say this: if you dislike another journalist’s work *do something better* don’t launch childish personal attacks. If you feel she misrepresents you, go to the library, work out the facts, do some research and write something which has some integrity. As it stands your output is of a lower order at the minute, not least because you write as though you were ranting at a friend in a pub (which would be fair enough if you could pull off that particular conceit), but because nothing I’ve read from you so far shows any serious ambition, analysis or insight. Throwing offal to the braying crowd? Underwhelming.
@Jay Bernand
I’m struggling to comprehend this ‘feigning ignorance’ accusation. We are a comedy website. First and foremost. We like to primarily make our readers chuckle, titter and sometimes even chortle in their lunch break. If we can get a sort of ‘moral denouement’ at the end, then that’s great!
The accusation that we should just ‘do something better’ is ridiculous. So one should never bemoan an actor/footballer/musician unless we can supersede them with our own ability?
We often go after many on the right, and have done a number of pieces on Platell, Littlejohn, Moir, Jones, Phillips, Littlejohn jnr, Street-Porter etc, and thought it was only fair that we wrote an article on someone on the other side of the political spectrum. Especially someone who has a reputation of being equally controversial.
Fundamentally, I think we’ve come to the end of the road with Laurie Penny. She offered what we felt was an abrasive and unsubstantiated opinion on our article, and when asked to explain herself with an example, she used her many years of journalistic experience to take the piss out of a typo of ours. You should have been there, it was a magical response (Our brief chat can be found here http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/12595. Brief being the key word).
Look, after repeated attempts to converse with her over our ‘points’, we were repeatedly knocked back, alleged of things that weren’t fair and seemingly roped in with a crowd that had made sexist and misogynistic comments against her. We’re just nice people who love our mums, feed our cats and try to run a fair and funny website. Fundamentally, it isn’t worth our while to be reduced to a mud slinging contest.
I have problems with journalists who use hyperbole to get their points across, and that isn’t going to change. Ever. If she makes people happy with her writing, then fine. We’ve seen numerous examples where we cannot put any doubt into her readers’ minds, so it’s not worthwhile us continuing to bother. We’ll go back to trying to have a laugh with out readers, she can go back to being ‘voice of a generation’. Everyone is happy.
Well I liked it
The only improvement you could have made was to spend more time outlining her wealthy background.
(I know she has an inheritance of some kind)
I must confess I read the Daily Mail, but I like to think I’m not stupid enough to believe everything they say.
We’re anarchists and we love Laurie so much we put her on a t-shirt.
Fcucking LAURIE PENNY and her ilk! You know what these bloody Europeans want us to do! Do you know how they make cheese? They sh1t in cow’s milk, then they masturbate thereupon said sh1t, store it in a barrel for a year and sell it to the British, for our kids to eat. THAT’S BRIE!!!
Cheapest cheese in the ‘supermarket’, I should cocoa. Laurie so-called PENNIE would have us all suckling at the teat of the European superstate and giving our kiddiwinks GOD KNOWS WHAT! Peace out.