Is Dissensus Learning?

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
it strikes me much as those laughable guardian articles from the likes of toynbee berating the people who contribute comments under her articles, and then committing the cardinal sin of not deeming to actually join the discussion - if you want to talk at people, don't be surprised when they turn nasty on you.

The relationship between the Guardian and their comment boxes is fascinating. I mean the depths of hatred for the Guardian which people - including their own readers - feel. I feel it too, often. But then I've also been known to shout at TV sets.

I think The Guardian has this problem especially because they're always talking down to people. They have a very smug, self-righteous tone, and this provokes fury. The interesting question is whether this fury will persuade them to try and modulate their condescenion. Which would be an interesting adaptation, an example of learning, and a sort of political shift.
 

bassnation

the abyss
The relationship between the Guardian and their comment boxes is fascinating. I mean the depths of hatred for the Guardian which people - including their own readers - feel. I feel it too, often. But then I've also been known to shout at TV sets.

I think The Guardian has this problem especially because they're always talking down to people. They have a very smug, self-righteous tone, and this provokes fury. The interesting question is whether this fury will persuade them to try and modulate their condescenion. Which would be an interesting adaptation, an example of learning, and a sort of political shift.

i've got a love / hate relationship with the paper too. the thing that most irks me about it is the barely veiled fear and hatred for the working class, exhibited in their articles about the people protesting against the lack of a publicly open paedophile register in portsmouth. i don't agree with the protestors cause to be honest, but the way the guardian wrote about them (snarky observations about council estate life) made me feel sick to the stomach. for a supposedly left-leaning paper that "cares" about the poor, they don't know much about them even though they want to save them. as in politics, newspapers may be right or left, but they are two sides of the same elite coin as far as i'm concerned. where is the real authentic voice of the working class to be found these days? don't even think about suggesting the morning star / socialist workers paper or the now defunct joke of a paper, class war!

the presumption that all their readers are from the same background as them also sticks in my throat. but i keep coming back to it because i agree with their bias, most of the time.
 
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bassnation

the abyss
Is there such a voice? Was there ever one?

yes, in the form of organised labour - unions, and even the early beginnings of the labour party when they still represented those communities. now though - i don't think so, which is one of the reasons why that vacuum was filled by the far right. not too sure about media though.
 

vimothy

yurp
Hmm -- I'm rather skeptical. Isn't there a political economy of labour unions? And how are labour unions more authentic than whatever we've got now?
 

bassnation

the abyss
Hmm -- I'm rather skeptical. Isn't there a political economy of labour unions? And how are labour unions more authentic than whatever we've got now?

wandering way off topic now lol, but whatever unions have become, historically they've been the only way for working communities to avoid exploitation. and a union is just that - a collective of workers. what is more authentic than people speaking for themselves? if you can think of something more representative than that, i'd be very interested!

of course wherever there is money there will be corruption - but if unions weren't representative, or a danger to the status quo as corporations would like, situations such as assassinations of workers attempting to start unions in the likes of coca cola plants in guatemala by death squads wouldn't have happened.

we had / are having to literally fight and die to for the right and i don't take that lightly at all.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Three points:

1) Unions often don't include the most exploited workers - i.e. immigrants - and sometimes they are very hostile to them.

2) Whenever unions actually do form, they entrench, bureaucratize, and begin pursuing their own interests. This happens on a larger scale as well - for instance, in the Soviet Union, where the high-ranking officials had their own special shops, privileges, and so on, in the name of the authentic voice of the proletariat.

3) Workers in a factory have a common interest, and the idea of a union is to express that interest. But this idea of authenticity seems a bit tricky, since it suggests, as its reverse, inauthenticity, and so seem to involve someone out of it somehow deciding? I suspect that you only get "authentic" voices once they've stopped being authentic. Like, nobody is as Italian in Italy as they are in Little Italy New York...
 
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nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
No, I've heard of it too. Quite a lot of people watched late-night Channel 4 documentaries twelve years ago, after all.

Never really took off, did it?

What the hell kind of weird TV do you guys get over there?

Channel 4 had something about teledildonics 12 years ago? That's the sort of thing that would be on like channel 668 at 4AM on a Saturday here and probably never seen by anyone.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Whatever it was, it can hardly be worse than Hollyoaks.

Hehehe.

Nomad, I couldn't swear it was twelve years ago, but it was certainly a while back. As far as I remember I was still in high school. It was probably on a programme with some geek breathlessly talking about how it was going to "revolutionise the way we have sex" or something like that (presumably to enable people like him to actually get some, I would imagine). It chimes in quite nicely with the legendary 'Imipolex G' plastic in Gravity's Rainbow.
 

bassnation

the abyss
Three points:

1) Unions often don't include the most exploited workers - i.e. immigrants - and sometimes they are very hostile to them.

yes, accepted. but this raises much larger questions (that i suspect are addressed in another thread discussing the protests this week) over globalisation, nationalism and capitalism as a whole. my question to you is why shouldn't unions protest cheap labour being shipped in by companies who won't be cutting directors salaries or shareholders dividends?

2) Whenever unions actually do form, they entrench, bureaucratize, and begin pursuing their own interests. This happens on a larger scale as well - for instance, in the Soviet Union, where the high-ranking officials had their own special shops, privileges, and so on, in the name of the authentic voice of the proletariat.

power corrupts, basically.

3) Workers in a factory have a common interest, and the idea of a union is to express that interest. But this idea of authenticity seems a bit tricky, since it suggests, as its reverse, inauthenticity, and so seem to involve someone out of it somehow deciding? I suspect that you only get "authentic" voices once they've stopped being authentic. Like, nobody is as Italian in Italy as they are in Little Italy New York...

i'm not sure i get this one!

however valid all these points are, the alternatives are much, much worse. look at walmart, look at those places where its illegal to start a union. its a pity there isn't more class conciousness, not less.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
yes, accepted. but this raises much larger questions (that i suspect are addressed in another thread discussing the protests this week) over globalisation, nationalism and capitalism as a whole. my question to you is why shouldn't unions protest cheap labour being shipped in by companies who won't be cutting directors salaries or shareholders dividends?

a fair point.

it would be a laudably supple union that could do that and also publicize among their members and the wider community a message of worker solidarity with non-citizen economic migrants.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
tell your mrs my oldest friend got to interview Sarah Jayne Dunn the other day. well he said Mandy from Hollyoaks.

(i googled her. apparently she was in the last Batman for three seconds - non-speaking - screen-time, as a moll. i know who Sarah Jayne Dunn is, just not that she was called Mandy whilst in Hollyoaks! i watched it the first year or two.)
 

bassnation

the abyss
a fair point.

it would be a laudably supple union that could do that and also publicize among their members and the wider community a message of worker solidarity with non-citizen economic migrants.

this is something that has torn the left asunder basically. international socialism was about supporting the oppressed, wherever they may be. but what happens when local issues conflict with international aims?

some say that this is another contributory reason of the collapse of the left in working class communities. people perceive, rightly or wrongly, that the left cares more for the oppressed in other countries and has abandoned them accordingly.
 

vimothy

yurp
The problem with the left is exactly the same as the problem with the right -- non of this is reducible to such a simple dichotomy.
 
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