Mad Paul Mason

[Proper Tidy]

Somebody else said we should have a thread on him and I agree, blokes fucking cracked. Didn't think it could get weirder than that play thing on BBC but somehow he's managed it . Anyway, saw this in his latest Guardian piece.

Let's chart Paul Mason's descent into the #fbpe david icke

 

[Proper Tidy]

.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

 

[HoratioCuthbert]

That selection of pictures just makes him look like a great drinking partner though- I mean if I could wear a mask the whole time in public I bloody would.

 

[HoratioCuthbert]

Best:

 

[HoratioCuthbert]

WHO WAS IN SPAIN ON THAT FATEFUL SUNDAY?

 

[Proper Tidy]

Best:

Not working for me but on your previous point I reckon he'd probably be good value to have a few pints with tbf

 

[HoratioCuthbert]

Not working for me but on your previous point I reckon he'd probably be good value to have a few pints with tbf

Well I meant worst, but best of the worst?
It’s fucking mad though LETS RENEGOTIATE THE LISBON TREATY!

 

[HoratioCuthbert]

I challenge anyone to post madder than that video.

 

[Wilf]

Oh dear.

 

[rekil]

LETS RENEGOTIATE THE LISBON TREATY!

He nicked that off a Proletarian Democracy tshirt slogan shortlist.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

The winner:

 

[HoratioCuthbert]

I’m forever entertained by people telling me to switch off BBC news. Mate, I never switched it on. You are arguing with yourself, couldn’t you do us a favour and keep the dialogue between you and your shadow off Twitter?

 

[krtek a houby]

Switch off your tv set, leave social media, don't read the papers, don't talk to anyone, stay indoors.

 

[William of Walworth]

Switch off your tv set, leave social media, don't read the papers, don't talk to anyone, stay indoors.

And don't ever go to the pub either! My new life-plan, as from today

 

[Baronage-Phase]

Best:

The strange grimace of a smile at the end is freaky.

 

[ska invita]

This post is going to come across as sanctimonious but I cant help that...sorry to say it Proper Tidy but I think this thread is in bad taste.

My impression is he is going through some mental health problems and so calling the thread "Mad Paul Mason", saying "blokes fucking cracked", and posting random pictures to try and back that up doesn't sit well with me. (The quote about 'a single mind coordinating the crisis' is taken unfairly out of context too IMO.)

I don't know him so my armchair analysis means shit all, but my impression is compared to how he seemed when he first started reporting around the 2008 financial crisis and onwards he does come across as increasingly erratic, and to me it looks like he is getting seriously burned out from over engaging and doing too much. In many ways going a bit mad is the sane response...its far from an uncommon trajectory....many amongst us have had our mental health deteriorate as a result of confronting the political situation and struggling to change it.

To me this thread doesn't feel like punching up it feels like punching across at our own. I get the political differences people may have but it doesn't have to be done like this.

By way of a little balance I thought Live Working Die Fighting was an excellent book...in fact there's a lot of good things that can be said about his work....he's genuinely committed...but whatever, sermon over.

 

[fucthest8]

Switch off your tv set, leave social media, don't read the papers, don't talk to anyone, stay indoors.

Anyone found outside the gates of their subdivision sector after curfew
Will
Be
Shot

 

[LDC]

He comes across to me as someone that 'means well' but has gone quite a way down the path of believing his own hype, much like celebs (of which he is in certain circles) who end up not having any ego moderating influences around them to pull them back from the flights of fancy and madness that we all can have. "Yes, yes, yes Paul, tell me again about Greece and Syriza...". Fucking yawn.

His politics are erratic at best, and he gives the impression of being a bit too caught up in the heady mix of the London political scene and all the excitement and egos and drinking and drugs that gives some of them in it this myopic idea that they're the centre of everything and all eyes in the world are on them.

Dunno who his comrades or friends are but if I were them I'd be telling him he needs to take a fucking break from all his breathless excitement about youthful networked kids in tight jeans he's always frothing about on social media and have a good holiday and a word with his ego instead before he explodes in a mess.

Ditto some of Novara tbh.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

This post is going to come across as sanctimonious but I cant help that...sorry to say it Proper Tidy but I think this thread is in bad taste.

To me this thread doesn't feel like punching up it feels like punching across at our own. I get the political differences people may have but it doesn't have to be done like this.

By way of a little balance I thought Live Working Die Fighting was an excellent book...in fact there's a lot of good things that can be said about his work....he's genuinely committed...but whatever, sermon over.

I agree with you about the book. I absolutely loved it. The way working class history was presented, the way it attempts to demonstrate continuing structures of feeling and collective memory and the way it provides examples of resistance to dispersal in post industrial places is brilliant.

However, let’s be clear Mason has been on a journey since. From the moment he proclaimed himself to be ‘a public intellectual’. The journey is towards popular frontism, towards a construction of a ‘new working class’ that ditches entire sections of the existing working class for good and towards a strategy that has seen the left obliterated and the far right in ascension where it’s been applied.

This work as LynnDoyleCooper reminds us has been performed within a self satisfied London bubble of affluent people who can afford to ‘do’ politics as a hobby and have incredible self regard for themselves and the bubble and a barely repressed disdain for the rest of us.

Unless narcissism is a mental health issue I can’t agree with the rest of your post

 

[sleaterkinney]

To me this thread doesn't feel like punching up it feels like punching across at our own. I get the political differences people may have but it doesn't have to be done like this.

By way of a little balance I thought Live Working Die Fighting was an excellent book...in fact there's a lot of good things that can be said about his work....he's genuinely committed...but whatever, sermon over.

C’mon, they wouldn’t be proper commies if they weren’t shooting their own in the back. Creepy photos and all.

 

[chilango]

Let's keep our guns turned outwards.

 

[NoXion]

He's not one of us.

 

[Proper Tidy]

This post is going to come across as sanctimonious but I cant help that...sorry to say it Proper Tidy but I think this thread is in bad taste.

My impression is he is going through some mental health problems and so calling the thread "Mad Paul Mason", saying "blokes fucking cracked", and posting random pictures to try and back that up doesn't sit well with me. (The quote about 'a single mind coordinating the crisis' is taken unfairly out of context too IMO.)

I don't know him so my armchair analysis means shit all, but my impression is compared to how he seemed when he first started reporting around the 2008 financial crisis and onwards he does come across as increasingly erratic, and to me it looks like he is getting seriously burned out from over engaging and doing too much. In many ways going a bit mad is the sane response...its far from an uncommon trajectory....many amongst us have had our mental health deteriorate as a result of confronting the political situation and struggling to change it.

To me this thread doesn't feel like punching up it feels like punching across at our own. I get the political differences people may have but it doesn't have to be done like this.

By way of a little balance I thought Live Working Die Fighting was an excellent book...in fact there's a lot of good things that can be said about his work....he's genuinely committed...but whatever, sermon over.

Fair enough. Probably shouldn't be calling him or anybody else mad. Don't really agree on burnout/mental health crisis, his madness is political imo, although yeah like many others I've had my own stuff which probably wasn't helped by doing political stuff. But Mason is a former economics editor of newsnight and C4 news and has fuck knows how many books published (including live working due fighting, which I also rated), he's a commentator with significant social weight and influence. We're not talking about some minor lefty activist here, ffs that 'why it's kicking off everywhere' play got an hour of BBC2 on a Saturday night, so I think it's entirely legit to have a thread on his politics. Which is what this is meant to be, I've probably not helped that by going in on him being mad but there we are.

Defo don't agree on the 'punching across' thing. Come on.

 

[sunnysidedown]

He comes across to me as someone that 'means well'

the worst sort.

 

[chilango]

Yep. It's definitely "punching up".

Whether he's the right target at this moment is open to question.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

C’mon, they wouldn’t be proper commies if they weren’t shooting their own in the back. Creepy photos and all.

“Proper commies”

 

[LDC]

Yep. It's definitely "punching up".

Whether he's the right target at this moment is open to question.

Yeah fair enough, except we're not really talking about demos or that, just moaning and chatting shit, sorry I mean analyzing his politics, on here where probably 10 people might read it. I won't be printing leaflets about him, but talking about him on here is fair game imo.

 

[chilango]

Yeah fair enough, except we're not really talking about demos or that, just moaning and chatting shit, sorry I mean analyzing his politics, on here where probably 10 people might read it. I won't be printing leaflets about him, but talking about him on here is fair game imo.

Yeah. I guess. Just a bit wary of getting too sucked into a twitter-lite kinda aimless snipeathon.

If we're picking on Mason (or Jones or Novara or whoever) let's focus on how and why he's not "one of us" and the political context of that rather than - just - pointing and laughing.

Sure, nobody's reading it except us. Probably. But it's not doing us much good.

 

[LDC]

"And there I was, knelt in Syntagma Square with the tear gas in my eyes, and Varoufakis on my right had just shot his copious load over the arm of my tight leather jacket, and I looked left and pleaded for the youthful masked anarchist to concentrate on finishing the job in (my) hand rather than his Twitter and hurry up before the euro collapsed and I missed my deadline for Channel 4."