Richard Seymour

Richard Seymour is a contributing editor at Salvage magazine and the author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics.

Schadenfreude with Bite: Trolling

Richard Seymour, 15 December 2016

The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman. The troll acts ‘as a self-appointed cultural critic’ in a tradition of clowns and jesters, according to Benjamin Radford, while simultaneously ‘plausibly maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’.

Letter

Bye Bye Labour

22 April 2015

Matthew Young is mistaken to think that Tony Blair’s electoral success proves the decisiveness of the centre ground (Letters, 7 May). Blair lost three million voters in his first term alone, and his third election victory was won with a smaller share of the vote than the Conservatives failed to win with in 2010. Tory weakness shielded him.In the 2015 election, the parties of the centre have done...

Bye Bye Labour

Richard Seymour, 23 April 2015

Ed Miliband sacks his shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, for conveying a ‘sense of disrespect’ towards the owner of a white van. Ed Balls, having given up his brief attempt at an attack on the coalition’s austerity policy, courts respectability by pledging to honour all the coalition government’s spending cuts. Rachel Reeves gratuitously alienates the unemployed and welfare recipients – groups she treats as identical, although the majority of people who receive benefits are in work – by insisting that Labour ‘is not the party to represent those who are out of work’.

The Uses of al-Qaida

Richard Seymour, 13 September 2012

President Obama has waged war on al-Qaida by drone and by ‘kill list’. Vladimir Putin has hunted al-Qaida in the North Caucasus. The late Colonel Gaddafi, and now Bashar al-Assad, have summoned alliances against it. The alarming ubiquity of al-Qaida, its mitosis and metastasis seemingly outpacing the destruction of its cells, is attested by the multiplication of enemies on the US...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences