Judiciousness/good manners and Nick Cohen….in the same sentence….something I thought I would never see in a million years.

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Nick Cohen in 2002 (writing in the New Statesman): “former lefties can make a good living in the media by attacking their ex-comrades, I’d do it myself if the price was right”.

The price was right then.

Recently, virulently right-wing blogs and magazines have been aflutter over a purported ‘aide’ to Ed Miliband, one Seph Brown, who they claim holds extreme views.

Who, out of interest? You cite Nick Cohen (who is hardly a “hard right” blogger) and make lots of references to all these virulent right-wingers, but even a quick google search comes back with nothing recent, and hardly anything from any right-wing blogs.

Whoever this Brown guy is, he desperately needs to change his blog photo.

Why does the Guardian waste it’s time with this little shit?

Sally – there are commenting rules in effect here, just to remind you:
http://liberalconspiracy.org/faq/#commentspolicy

Stick to them.

also – it’s the Observer that employs Cohen, not Guardian.

Tim J – clearly you’re not searching hard enough. This was also mentioned in the Spectator last week, though I can’t find the article online.

Just to point out: the headline makes the article seem as though we’re about to be told that Ed Miliband has been doing the smearing…

cohen’s desperately trying to semar E Miliband – he tried it in an Obs article earlire this summer, accusing Ed’s team of, er, smearing his brother.

Aside from Cohen’s general hatred of anything even vaguely connected to Gordon Brown, I can’t quite work out why, it just makes Nick look stupid.

as the above clearly does.

though i agree, the title is a little misleading.

have changed the article headline

“Aside from Cohen’s general hatred of anything even vaguely connected to Gordon Brown, I can’t quite work out why, it just makes Nick look stupid. ”

I could explain it to you, but Sunny won’t let me. And it is his site so he has every right to do that.

“also – it’s the Observer that employs Cohen, not Guardian.”

Are they not the same thing?

Like Richard Littlejohn or Jeremy Clarkson, Nick Cohen and his brand of provocative, left-liberal baiting punditry really are not worth acknowledging, let alone engaging with.

So, er, here I am, ignoring him totally.

Crikey, Nasty Nick must be near the bottom of the barrel if he’s got to resort to kicking newbies like Seph Brown.

The seeming lack of good faith one finds in Nick’s opinion writing these days leaves me with the personal opinion that he’s taking kickbacks to write biased filth.

The seeming lack of good faith one finds in Nick’s opinion writing these days leaves me with the personal opinion that he’s taking kickbacks to write biased filth.

That’ll be his journalistic training, I think.

@13. SteveRooney: “Like Richard Littlejohn or Jeremy Clarkson, Nick Cohen and his brand of provocative, left-liberal baiting punditry really are not worth acknowledging, let alone engaging with.”

Littlejohn and Clarkson are right wing polemicists. They’ll float a populist argument which may aggravate social tensions. They may not believe the argument that they proffer but they do it to sell stories. They do not appear culpable for the social disruption or misconduct that arises from their words.

Nick Cohen is a devil’s advocate who challenges lefty liberals about their preconceived notions of the world in lefty liberal language. LibDems are as frequent targets as Labour. Cohen’s arguments are not designed to create social division. If his words were published in the Daily Mail, most readers would turn over the page.

I rarely discover much from his words per se, but the arguments around them are interesting. More accurately, some counter arguments are illuminating but many are personal attacks based on having a Jewish family name.

Nick Cohen defends the second Iraq/Gulf war; I could never do that. But when he makes an argument, I’ll read it on the basis of the essay that is presented. (On those words, I will judge the author according to recent arguments; if the author suddenly jumps ship, I expect an essay to explain; Johann Hari jumped ship honestly.)

Poor Seph Brown needs to learn about ad hoc exchanges with chatty gentlemen, but more importantly about Middle East politics. Nick Cohen in his Standpoint article: “Anyway, I was unaware of the fuss and was chatting to him [Seph Brown] about the Middle East, and he would not offer a word of criticism of Hamas.” Imran (OP) provides a link to this story at http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3282.

Frankly, this makes me more eager to campaign for Ed than pretty much anything else that’s happened in the campaign. Thanks Nick, you pointless, poisonous, wish you were American so you could earn a living peddling fear on Fox News, wannabe hack.

Re: Charlieman @ 16

That already got linked, and read, and plausibly discredited, by the OP. Thanks for stirring shit up though.

It is mostly those of the right who read this stuff (online anyway) – look at Harry’s Place, it claims to be on the left yet because 90% of the time it writes about Islamism it attracts a very right-wing crowd of commenters. If, like Nick, you almost always write about “how the left is bad, mad etc”, you will invariably attract a right-wing audience who will smugly crow that they “always knew the left were like that”.

Cohen’s evident disdain toward his former attachments brings to mind Isaac Deutscher’s description of an ex-Communist who, having disembarked from the locomotive of history, is “haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society,” and who “tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frank aggressiveness.”

There is a strange logic at work here in the comments here, other than in Charlieman’s post. It seems that Nick Cohen has to be viewed as catering to the right, because he is not writing things that agree with the main left-wing narratives, but rather challenging them. He may not be right, but is not internal debate and challenging actually a good thing? Why are so many people inclined to tribally disregard comments that they don’t like without considering the arguments? Nick Cohen is not right-wing, as no definition of right-wing is based on writing things left-wingers don’t like. He may attract right-wing readers, but he is not writing for them specifically (and they are still, in reading him, reading a left-wing point of view). In trying to marginalise and demoise rather than engage with his views (which, in this case, appear wrong – see the original post which does the correct thing in this respect), there is a risk of narrowing the left-wing to the ‘intellectually pure’ and becoming a more-and-more narrow and limited movement.

You do not have to like, or read, Nick Cohen. But if you don’t like him, that does not give you the right to decide his political stance is not acceptable as ‘left-wing’.

@20. Thing is, you can’t be “leftwing” just by calling yourself leftwing and thinking leftwing things. You have to be accepted by the Left. It’s a relatively small circle of permitted thought and absolutely everything outside of it is, by definition, rightwing. If lefties think that Nick Cohen isn’t left, then that’s all that’s required to make him rightwing. See also David Cameron and Tony Blair, men who can never again be considered leftwing no matter what they do.

It’s not quite that simple. Were it for the fact that Cohen or, for another example, Christopher Hitchens, were criticising the left yet at the same time making left wing arguments in other areas – say the economy for example – it would not be fair to brand them as having shuffled off to the right merely for criticising regressive aspects of left-wing opinion – of which there are many.

The thing is that they no longer bother doing so, and there comes a point when you cannot only say what you are aginst, but you must also state what you are actually for.

*against

I have no problem with some one on the left attacking the left. What I hate his liars who pretend they are on the left, but are really tories who spout tory talking points. In America the media is full of these morons who claim not to be Republican but just write republican talking points all the time. They pretend that there is some sort of bi- partisanship that must be obeyed. Usually these people are wrong about just about everything. They are always teling the left not be nasty to the right, but they never lecture the right wing.

His piece on Sunday was drivel of the worst kind. When he has to bring on that fat toad that went off and took the Murdoch shilling to make his case you know Cohen has lost the plot.

It seems that Nick Cohen has to be viewed as catering to the right, because he is not writing things that agree with the main left-wing narratives, but rather challenging them.

Challenging what? If he actually made salient points it would be more difficult to dismiss him. But these days it seems all Nick Cohen does is get drunk and rant about how the BBC and Guardian are running editorials to destroy the west… Islamists are everywhere… the left ignores feminists etc.

Hey it doesn’t surprise me right-wingers want to defend him for ‘speaking the truth’ but it would actually help (as demonstrated above) if he represented things fairly. Then we’d take him more seriously.

I don”t mind so much that Mr Cohen is on the Right of the party. My flatmate is a Progress type and we have vibrant debate at home alongside legendary verbal brawls over the Movement. That’s good. That’s healthy. That’s what it’s meant to be about.

But Cohen seems to think it’s appropriate in this case to slur a good candidate by engaging in truly horrible politics. What I think is most affronting is that he is trying to slur a decent man by destroying a kid’s career. Not a professional politician. Not someone like me that has flecks of grey in his bonce and should know better. But rather someone that is in that wonderful age where they reflexively explore their own opinion and have no real influence beyond his (huge) energy and drive and (one would hope, at his age and level of ability, constantly evolving) intellect.

It is just filthy. To use in such a pernicious way the reputation of someone that I believe to have great ability and potential, and all to mendaciously illustrate why Ed Miliband is not his choice of candidate. How dare he?

He doesn’t challenge left wing narratives, he just abuses people who don’t agree with torture. For years he’s done nothing but support a superpower’s war while pretending to be an underdog.

Oh but he hates rich people so he must be a credible leftie, that makes perfect sense.

I can’t see that Nick Cohen has put a foot wrong. It looks to me that young Seph was invited by Cohen unambiguously to condemn Hamas, but chose instead to utter weasel words about not offering “any support or sympathy to Hamas”.

Not good enough, Seph.