“The cupcake has always been a gentrifying force … you could get a huge mass of people to participate in a reactionary endeavour if you dressed it up in nice, twee, cupcakey imagery, and persuaded everyone that the brutality of your ideology was in fact a form of niceness.” — Tom Whyman for Critical Legal Thinking, Guardian “Comment Is Free”, my Tweet h/t @Ben_McGinnis.
4 Comments
Alan Sokal has an imitator. Of course, if this article is actually not a joke, then an asylum is missing an inmate.
So are you saying that the Guardian has jumped the cupcake?
Apart from the ridiculous hook, this isn’t that bad. This hits right in the libertarian – liberal convergence area. The role that business and land use regulations play in gentrification should be added; otherwise, looking at the gentrified’s infantile willingness to roll over for the government is worthwhile.
@Jim Sweet
One gets the feeling he is exactly the type of self-affirming pseudo-intellectual that was the object of Sokol’s ruse.
Gotta love the chutzpah shown by someone who claims it is fascist for the government to lessen its economic influence through austerity measures.
And who can argue with the assertion that rioters are wonderfully childlike because they are exploring possibilities to which the adult mind is closed. But at the same time stating that the residents who organized cleaning groups are infantilised adults trying to hide from societies problems: rioting=childlike exploration (good), cleaning-up=desiring childlike ignorance (bad).