there's our catastrophe

content note: rape, child sexual abuse

bill roache, march 2013, on jimmy savile:

Roache: “If you accept that you are pure love, and if you know that you are pure love and therefore live that pure love, these things won’t happen to you.”

Interviewer Garth Bray: “To some people that sounds perhaps like you’re saying victims bring things on themselves – is that what you’re saying?”

Roache: “No, not quite, but and yet I am, because everything that happens to us has been a result of what we have been in previous lives or whatever.”

…Roache: “Paedophilia is absolutely horrendous. Paedophiles should be sought out, rooted out and dealt with. But there’s a fringe of people who, particularly pop singers, they have these groupies, these girls, who come, they’re sexually active, sexually mature, they don’t ask for their birth certificate, they don’t know what age they may be. But they’re certainly not grooming them and exploiting them, but they can be caught in this trap. These people are instantly stigmatised, some will be innocent, some will not, but until such time as it’s proven there should be anonymity for both”…

Roache: “If someone has done something wrong the law will take its course. But even so, all of them, whether they are proven guilty or not, we should not be judgmental about anybody, ever. We shouldn’t go around condemning, unforgiving. We should all be totally forgiving about everything.”

(src)

bill roache, may 2013:

arrested on two counts of rape of a 15-year-old girl in 1967

like

if somebody is really really concerned about the effect of accusations of sexual assault on the person accused

do not be at all surprised if it turns out they have a vested interest here

Theses on Thatcherdeath 2013

imagesfromthefuture:

Today’s Novara on Thatcher’s death was an interesting assessment of her legacy. Here are a few of my own brief theses on Thatcher’s death and celebrations, loosely based on the themes in the show.

1) “She may be dead, but her legacy continues”. No one is so stupid to believe otherwise. Ignorance of this is not the reason people celebrated her death, was never the reason people planned the celebration her death. In the conservative historian E. Kantorowicz’s tome, The King’s Two Bodies, he explores how the medieval sovereigns of Europe were invested with both a body corporeal- the shitting breathing bit- and a body mystic - the actual concept of sovereignty itself, that includes the realm and its holy order. Going much further here is going to take me off track, but my point is this: it is a long-established precedent to embody a conceptual framework in a person, with complete appreciation for the artificiality of doing so. Thatchers death is important precisely because it prefigures the death yet to come; the death of neoliberal economics itself. 

2) Must we show respect for the dead? 

Thatcher never afforded her enemies the same respect. Moreover, her class, her party, has never afforded the poor that respect. From Pinochet to Hillsborough, this bears repeating. Those who accuse ‘fellow leftists’ of flippancy or lack of solemnity, are themselves the least serious of all, because they are clearly incapable of taking seriously the material impact of neoliberalism, and seeing therein the cause of our rejoicing. 

3) This is a moment to make a break, to disrupt the solemn atmosphere of statesmanlike economic sycophancy.We were expected to don our rictus grins for the Royal Wedding, The Olympics, and now expected to make the national switch to mourning. In a quotidian sense, we are constantly implored to produce the right affect at the right moment, in the intensively affective labour of post-industrial economy. Our affect will never be appropriate under capitalism.  We should embrace the anomic qualities of this moment: ’The left’, so often accused of ‘joylessness’ is now, suddenly, too joyful.

4) ‘The left’ is not celebrating because ‘it was beaten’. We are celebrating because we are still here. We have survived. As long as we survive there is a chance for revenge, the revenge of actually building the world we want to see.

Posterity will ne’er survey

A nobler grave than this:

Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

Stop, traveller, and piss. 

-Byron

(via monetizeyourcat)

violentkittyhawk asked: I was SO happy to see your post on the Julia Gillard speech & the reality vs. Tumblr reaction. I'm in NZ so have seen probably a lot more of the Australian government stuff than what, say, people from USA may have seen - all the Tumblr stuff was pissing me off but you have been able to articulate it so well (I just kept yelling "NO" at my screen).

let’s talk about this in the context of stupid bourgie liberal feminists in the States talking smack about how Thatcher, whatever else you may think of her, is a ~*~powerful woman who deserves our respect~*~

let’s talk about this in the context of Julia Gillard not only getting on that sycophantic bandwagon but attempting to link it to herself as first Australian woman PM, saying “[h]er service as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom was a history-making achievement… Her strength of conviction was recognised by her closest supporters and her strongest opponents.”

let’s talk about this in the context of the Labor-branded but thoroughly neoliberal Gillard as a direct descendent of Thatcher

like, congratulations US residents, your media and politicians tend less towards outright displays of public nastiness than most of the british isles and ireland, another way of putting that could be that they are fulsome and sanctimonious. 

and US political culture is permeated by the idea that being left-wing is the preserve of the upper classes (an idea that the left reinforces every time some latte-sipper makes a redneck joke, incidentally), therefore there isn’t such a strong consciousness of neoliberalism as a cause of the misery of the working classes, that personal pain is less likely to be articulated in the form of a critique of capitalism.  This is not the case in the british isles and ireland — in my observation there is more class consciousness in those places, I mean there’s a fucking hereditary aristocracy, you’d have to be pretty dense not to get it.  Reagan was pretty popular with a wide range of people, but Thatcher was polarising, and hated by the working classes, especially in the North/Scotland/Ireland/Wales — let’s not forget that the UK includes a lot of places that are in fact occupied and subjugated territories with strong anti-Imperial sentiments that are often tied to socialist politics. 

I’m not from the US or the UK so I’m happy to be corrected on anything I’ve misrepresented or misunderstood but I really think that’s the bulk of what’s going on here: more class consciousness, blunter people, and a more abrupt and brutal transition to neoliberalism from social democracy. 

yes, the greater degree of vitriol americans see going toward thatcher compared to reagan is definitely because of her gender and in no way related to any other differences in the US and UK political culture and landscape

for fuck’s sake, people