Posts by Tom Beard
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Hard News: Friday Music: Dancing Fool, in reply to Russell Brown,
Stereo MCs, ‘Connected’.
THIS.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Dancing Fool, in reply to Russell Brown,
Back when I used to drive, I once drove across the crest of the hill into the blazing sunset right as the build hit on that track. That was quite a magical moment.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Dancing Fool, in reply to bob daktari,
Yeah, forget cowbells: the secret to the dancefloor is MOAR 303!
Of course, there's always bluegrass AND techno...
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I used to think that remixing Blue Monday was like giving the Taj Mahal a shiny new paint job: sacrilegious and pointless. But when I heard Hardfloor's version ... oh my lord, get me to a dancefloor!
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Danielle,
Heh. The "consequences" are currently about twelve people in this thread saying "man, that was kinda dickish". Also: STALINISM. :)
Snap!
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Dean Papa,
But the point here is that consequence free should not be an excuse for wanton character assassination.
The consequence of being a dick is that people will point out that your character is, well, a bit dickish. Pointing that out is not "assassination".
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I generally despise these things, and consider them in the main to be as relevant and insightful as astrology. But I was recently surprised by some similar tests that seemed genuinely useful for helping people work together. As I understand it (can't find the links right now) the Extravert-Introvert scale is the only one that has any reliability or correlation with other indices, and some recent work my employer did seemed to focus on that (among other dimensions). It was open and collaborative, and it aimed at how to get people with diverse working and communication styles to respect each other's differences and work together more effectively. I learned some things from that.
However, when used as blunt, opaque tools for recruitment or redundancy, the Myers-Briggs type of testing is inisidious, pseudoscientific and dangerous.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Tom Semmens,
The sneering tone you adopt in discussing those you clearly consider to be your social inferiors perhaps answers your question better than I ever could. It is called the Labour party for a reason, one of those reasons being organised Labour makes Jack as good as all his masters - including the condescending middle-class intellectual ones.
I should probably let this lie, but ... any "sneering" in my post is a sneer at the mythological straw-bloke conjured up by the anti-"identity politics" commentators: hence my use of the words "supposed" and "essentialised". It's the sneer at the false dichotomy that the likes of Trotter, Tamihere & Jones keep trotting out: economics vs racism/sexism/homophobia/environmental issues. It's condescending to suggest that someone struggling on the minimum wage doesn't care (or is atcively hostile to) issues that affect women, LGBTI people, people of colour or those facing a fucked-up environment. You know, there might even be some overlap between those people. Shockingly, some might even suggest that those people might have been more heavily fucked around by neoliberalism than straight white male unionists.
As for "makes Jack as good as all his masters": well, I guess your choices of name and pronoun speak for themselves.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Tim Darlington,
middle-class intellectuals
Is it just me, or does it strike anyone as weird that middle-class intellectuals (academics and teachers and public servants and socially liberal professionals) aren't considered part of Labour's core voting base? Surely they/we have been for generations.
I have strong memories of my parents taking me to Labour Party events in the 70s and 80s, in between anti-Tour and nuclear disarmament rallies. A wide spectrum of social justice, environmental and yes, "identity politics" issues have been as much a part of that movement as economic and equality issues. When did we start turning the clock back to the days of cloth-capped blokey-bloke wharfies and miners and catering to some vision of their supposed salt-of-the-earth misogyny and homophobia as an essentialised emblem of "true Labour" voters?
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"Who would have thought that big beats and soppy folk would go together so sweetly?"
It does work surprisingly well, doesn't it? Then again, Everything But The Girl went all Drum & Bass for a while, to great effect (well, I thought so at the time), and I first heard Beth Orton on a Chemical Brothers track, so the combination has form.