A Few Links. posted by Richard Seymour

Admittedly this is lazy blogging, but I'm sort of busy with, y'know, work...

So, here goes. Chris Lightfoot has a take-down of Oliver Kamm that includes the following recipe for a Kamm rant:

[S]lightly obscure cultural reference, portentous tone, grammatical sniping, the inevitable bitching about a Liberal Democrat, and a rhetorical attack on Soviet communism, only fifteen years too late.

Kamm has many detractors on the 'net, and a few emulators as well. I guess he's just so full of piping hot crap that the very mention of his name draws flies.

Chris Brooke offers reasons to be cheerful if you're on the Left, and also has a nice little dig at Johann Hari for his recent, very poorly conducted interview with Antonio Negri . On that subject, I would just note that I find it very unlikely that Negri was really as sad and vacuous as Hari made him out to be. He is a serious thinker, a turbo-charged intellectual. He was bound to have something interesting to say. Unfortunately, Hari is on precocious, obnoxious form, and it all turns into a foil for him to rail against the evils of communism. Now, a good interviewer knows how to get the best out of his/her subject - Hari just seems intent on making Negri look like a baffled old fool with some objectionable views.

Charlotte Street has some unkind words to say about the same, comparing it to Andrew Marr's stunningly inept interview with Noam Chomsky in which Marr was so uninformed and so unfamiliar with Chomsky's work that he managed to misfire every single time. At the end, Chomsky had made Marr look rather foolish, but Marr was completely oblivious.

Harry's Place carries a fine dissection of that shamefully bloated ego, "Dr" Gillian McKeith. An utter fraud, this slimy, sanctimonious bitch has been the bane of my fucking existence for the last few weeks. I've considered larding up just to piss her off. I can't wait 'til some fat family, sick of being patronised by this contemptible wax-figure of a human being, decides to gang up and eat her. That will crack me up for fucking days.

Finally, I have attracted a parodist . My initial reaction, on Harry's Place , who informed me of the fact, was that it was an honour. Having read it, though, it's just a bore. It has all the biting satire of a put-down from Socialism in an Age of Waiting ("ya wee wanker, fuck away off" etc), and exhibits no particular sense of having either read my blog or grasped my style. It's just a litany of rather poorly conceived insults. It's childish. I personally don't see the funny side at all, and frankly it's rather immature and blah blah blah...