boring people to be around...

Your response is very illuminating and, er, firm!
NFD is a fantastic, important song, enjoyed rousingly by the revellers in Pravda last night.

They read and understand lyrics the same way they read and understand the cooking instructions on their instant noodle packages.

Typical Socialist logic.

Bieng a Socialist in modern time is like believing in the Four Humors, but I digress.

This is yet more lazy, ill researched hack journalism which, rather than sully it's hands with research, is content to lie back and follow the lead taken by such literary luminaries as Nick Ferrari.
Morrissey, it seems, by default was guilty for the death of Stephen Lawrence. He yearns for an England that never existed? No, he records and reminisces about the England he knew all too well - I can't find any glamour or cosiness in songs like Jeane or Suffer Little Children, but what do I know.
Morrissey condones the National Front? No, but he makes an effort to understand what marginalises people. If you follow his line of reasoning then he condones rent boys, wheel chair users, failed boxers, heroin addicts, transvestites and the late great Elvis Presley - it is a nonsense. Morrissey is attracted to those people who exist outside society, for good or bad, just as he does to a certain extent and makes the effort to understand why people are excluded or why they choose to live life outside the norm. He once, and just once, made a reference (I think it was in Select magazine) that the National Front should be allowed access to the media, in an effort to reduce the risk of political violence - controversial, but hardly a Nuremburg Rally...then again, this is the same man who said he admired England football hooligans because of their excellent taste in footwear, so the tongue remains firmly in cheek.
Gay Morrissey? Whose business is it to know what Moz gets upto in the sack? I think our journo friend doth protest too much, because this really is the newsgathering of the level of HEAT or Closer. Morrissey has his own reasons for not talking about sex, partly out of old fashioned reserve and good manners for starters. And why should he choose to become a poster boy for gay rights - he has a job to do, which is to sell records and that has nothing to do at all with who is currently pouring the pork with. And to be honest, and speaking for myself, sex for some working class, Irish Catholics, is something that goes on behind closed doors and mind your own business.
Articles like this, and the previous Times one, are not only wrong, and not only lazy, and full of lies and half truthes, they ultimately affect Morrissey in that they will put people off buying his records. Tossers.

This piece is one of the worst of its kind I've read. It can be glossed very simply in 3 quick parts:

[1]
"I used to dislike ice cream. It was always too cold, and became drippy and sticky. There were many flavors-- and toppings, lots of toppings-- but I disliked it anyway. The principal characteristic of ice cream is that it is cold: who wants that?

[2]
"Ice cream is troublesome, of course. Ice cream is pure concentrated evil, and as such, anti-evil people like myself dislike it. Anti-obesity folks like me know that it's a fatty food and it causes obesity. Ice cream is a tool of the pro-exploitation master classes to keep the working classes preoccupied with simple pleasures while they are robbed by the corporations. Where do we find ice cream trucks? In ghettos, that's where, tinkling with that crazy brainwashing pro-fascist music. I am anti-that. (Ice cream, not ghettos.) Anyway. Ice cream: the opium of the masses! I mean, that is, if opium was much more common and legal and found in supermarkets and Marx and dialectical materialism and bourgeois alienation and rise up, brothers!"

[3]
"That was years ago. Despite the bad stuff I now like ice cream. Why? I dunno. I mean, have you seen it lately? Tasted it? Ice cream is fun and it comes in colors I like. The principal characteristic of ice cream is that it is cold: who can resist that? I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! Wheeee!"

Sections 1 and 3 are the only genuine thoughts of the writer. Section 2 is the Wikithought he types up to satisfy the high intellectual standards of a website like Teen Socialists' Home Journal or whatever he writes for. It's a steaming load of bullshit he includes so that his position seems sophisticated rather than poorly argued and arbitrary.

This is a writer who insists Morrissey is gay only a few sentences after quoting Morrissey's adamant-- and in 23 years never contradicted-- declaration that his sexuality defies categories. It's as if he quoted Morrissey to fill out the word count of the article. Soon after, with breathtaking stupidity, he insolently suggests Morrissey kept his sexuality secret to protect his career. Yes, of course. I suppose it was Geoff Travis who put the image of a naked man on the cover of The Smiths' very first record then. Male buttocks are a brilliant way of evading "the gay police". I guess Morrissey must have been away at Butch Camp or he'd have stopped the presses.

Forget the detractors, the "journalists who lie", the high court judges. Morrissey has suffered the worst abuse at the hands of the people who have ventured out of their caves to praise him. He must laugh to keep from weeping.

-- Worm

The Socialist Review is the theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers' Party

The SWP is a nominally revolutionary socialist party which is presently in coalition (in their "Respect" front organisation) with the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood: an extreme theocratic organisation which seeks to re-establish a "Caliphate", governed according to 7th century religious laws, whose theoreticians call for the execution homosexuals and of Muslims who change their faith.

The Socialist Workers' Party has moved a very long way from its socialist roots. One of its most prominent members - Lindsey German [cpgb.org.uk] - famously gave a speech in which she said "I’m in favour of defending gay rights, but I am not prepared to have it as a shibboleth".When a communist trade unionist called Hadi Saleh [tuc.org.uk] was murdered by the Baathist "resistance" - which the SWP supports - leading SWP thinker Alex Callinicos [zmag.org] mocked the outrage at his murder as a "hullabaloo".

I agree with much of what Popside Aggro says, above. But then, you wouldn't expect someone like Martin Smith to truly understand about what it really means to be marginalized. He would seem to be a jumped up little bully whose climb to Secetary General of the party has resulted in one thing: the aggrandizment of Martin Smith. He is now the Establishment, the godfather of the BSWP. And, lucky us, from time to time he uses his platform to hold forth on music. Those interested in reading these artricles will find them to be one-dimensional and trite, fanzine level stuff. I believe that history shows it is in the workers' best interest to organize, but powermongers like "comrade" Smith who regurgitate polemic while acting fundamentally in their personal interests derail this noble cause. He probably just decided to jump on the bandwagon because he finds Moz irresistably attractive. It's a good start. If he keeps listening he might learn something.

Despair & I

who is Martin Smith and the mags? a socialist?

......is that the Far Right and the Far Left will never ever realise that they desperately need each other. Otherwise, what would be the point of their respective miserable existance?

Oh, the irony.....

I have spent time with both sets and find them equally as squalid and unintelligent.

The far right and the far left are merely two sides of the same coin. Both are paranoid, irrational, and prone to fascist tendencies that leave them blind to such obvious irony. Religion, in its various forms is omnipresent.

What's sad is how many people, even on here, who gravitate towards the far left. Youth is usually the culprit, as is mental illness, but truth has never been a common human endeavor.

As for the far right, well, we all know God is responsible for their rampant insanity. Sometimes, I don't know which is worse, blind faith in the State, or blind faith in a supernatural being. Both are based on false assumptions about each's integrity, and the path to hell that is the utopian dream.

Suddenly I've developed the urge to reread "Animal Farm."

Ah, fuck it, I'll settle for sex.

wot a pile of crap.
i had to write and tell the journo...... ;-)))))))

Ignore the man's drivel. Socialism doesn't work, full stop, too many freeloaders these days (most of them from the working classes)who are prepared to dodge work, become obese and smoke themselves into ill health and live off the state for life while the rest of us work twice as hard, paying ever more tax to subsidise their dossing in front of the tv. He should stop banging on about his worn-out rhetoric that was briefly fashionable in the 80's - no doubt, where this man's mind is still firmly stuck. Listen up, you loud mouthed, upper middle class bores. Get off your high horse and get a life. Fascist pigs. Moz rules, he can say what he wants.