DeanoL
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Posts posted by DeanoL
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Perhaps.
But as I have stated before, the festival itself relies on the very thing that some would like to attack.
Business provides the beer, cigarettes, food, speakers, guitars, etc etc
Challenging the norms re the above would be interesting, would it not?
Sure - because there's no other way of doing it - there are no companies that provide those things with alternative models. It's notable though that if you take stewarding and litter picking, for example, that an alternative model involving volunteers and charitable donations is used, rather than outright paying for the service, as it's an option.
I don't think you need a tent that is explicitly right wing. I do think that there is a case for balanced political debate rather than the current "It's leftwing or nothing".
The Leftfield debates are open to the floor. I do wish there was more balance on the panels, but if a crowd full of right wing Tories turned up for the debates, they would become balanced. In many ways, the festival reflects the outlooks of those who attend it. Which likely accounts for some of your discomfort: white, middle-class tory-voting males are not used to being in a minority
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Is it left wing discussion?
Don't think it necessarily needs to be.
Well were the debates at leftfield all left wing discussion?
Are human rights, feminism and fracking necessarily left wing discussion?
Yes, some of the discussions about trade unionism and radical activism were, but a lot of the talk wasn't.
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What I had hoped to get was a better understanding of WHY some people find the idea of right wing representation at the festival a bad idea, framed in the terms of tolerance and mutual respect.
Thing is, the right wing aren't that interesting in being at the festival either, as we're not really an audience interested in listening to them.
I'd imagine Cameron got the usual invite along with all the other party leaders this year, and declined it.
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Really?
Explain to me why people would go to work if everyone was "equal" then?
You can still narrow it down a fair bit though. If some people are motivated to go to work because they want to be rich, then having the top paying jobs pay 200k rather than 2 million would have the same effect.
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Deano I fully expected to be sticking my head above the parapet on this forum, and clearly I am going to be in the minority. I don't mind being attacked, but I would rather it be in the form of counter argument and debate.
Personal insults are like water off a ducks back, (and quite obviously I really couldn't give a toss about my "downvotes"). However, they are boring, predictable and clutter up the debate.
Anyway this shouldn't be about me, it should be about politics.
I thought it was about Glastonbury? And that side's been covered off fairly well - there's some left-wing campaigning about Glastonbury because it's in it's history and it fits the politics of those who run and support it. I'm not sure what else there is to say about it?
For general debate you might have more luck in the general forum.
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This thread has reminded me why I stopped posting a few years back. Of course I always knew that my political views would be in the minority on here, that much is obvious, but posted again on the subject to test the waters, in the vain hope that this forum had matured enough to have a debate rather than descend into the easy, childish, "there's more of us than you" personal insults and narrow minded predjudice.
Sadly that's not the case.
I think it can be summed up nicely by the number of upvotes Russycraps got when he launched into his first unprovoked and childish rant.
I think this says everything about this person's character, intelligence level and class. The fact that it got upvoted tells you all you need to know about those people too.
Sure, but you have to balance that about extraordinarily biased media and the fact that your lot are actually in power.
The way you feel looking at this forum - being attacked, hounded, alone with no-one to support you - is the way a huge amount of posters here feel every day in their lives, and they can't just close the browser on living.
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How so?
Ok let's choose a random consequence of this act.
Siraj Yassin Abdullah Ali, sentenced to nine years in jail for his role in the Islamist bomb plot of July 21, 2005, has been released after serving half his term and is now walking the streets of London because his “human rights” mean he cannot be deported to his native eritrea.
I presume you are happy with that?
That a man who has served his sentence is now allowed to go free? Yes I am.
Why is the solution to this problem to dismantle the human rights act? Why is it not to fix the mechanisms that only gave him nine years, or the mechanisms that let him out with half that served, if he's still a danger to society?
It's interesting that the proposed solution just happens to be the one that will allow the government much more far ranging powers that can be employed against all its citizens with no accountability.
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I think this better illustrates my point. I really enjoyed the idea of the CND peace sign and the like as collective, positive action.
I just perceived the Shangri-la sort of stuff as a bit hate-fuelling (I understand that there is actually a lot of hatred, just making observations) and divisive. In comparison, everywhere else in the festival is massively pro-diversity in all forms, and at least a tolerance of differing political opinion.
You realise they were protesting the organisation of the afterlife and the over-corportization of Hell right?
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Completely get all of the above, and as I say I'm not fussed one way or the other. I just find it odd how inclusivity is at the heart of so much of Glasto, yet so much is so narrow about the spectrum of opinions you see and can have. In our group of 6 for example, I know votes in May went for at least 3 different political parties. That's our choice, it doesn't make me like/respect them or anyone else more or less. However how it can be right for things like the below to be completely fine with no other side of the argument are what I'm referring to. Where's the huge mural mocking Ed Miliband?
There's probably some confusion here. Leftfield is very political, advertised as such, and does what it says on the tin. I do wish they'd actually invite people of different views to have actual debates, but that's not what they do. Outside of that, there's not much politics at the festival (there's a thread from earlier in the year bemoaning the lack of it, in fact).
This year we had Shangri-La - the important thing to understand is that Shangri-La is interactive theatre, it tells a story that takes it's cues from real world goings on but it's fiction. Last year, the them was all about corporations taking over Hell, and we saw all their big corporate ideals being imposed. That wasn't them being pro-capitalism, it was them telling a story. This year the story was that people had started to rise up and protest against the corporate overlords - again, this was reflect Occupy and other real world movements, but it was part of the story, part of the fiction. It was certainly fiction with a left-wing bias but it wasn't actually out-and-out campaigning. Even though it was, paradoxically, actual fictional campaigning!
tbf, they do let Frank Turner in every year.
Ironically enough, this was the first year they let him in since 2010. Quite possibly because of his political views.
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Almost every positive review I've read of external camping has called the standard camping dirty and theft ridden
Except there was more theft and more rubbish in the regular camping than in glamping this year, so that's accurate. I've not seen people claim any moral superiority from that, but it does happen to be true.
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That's bollocks cart-before-horse type reasoning.
Glamping doesn't cause divisions - it shows them up, exposes them and worsens them.
Again you seem to have returned to your favourite concept of it all being about where people sleep at night - as has been stated again and again and again it's about attitude/presumptions not geographical location - but I guess that rather diminishes your argument.
Then you try and diminish those people's point by belittling them and then ignoring the whole point they started with having set up a stupid one to knock down.
Boring. Not helpful.
Okay - I get your thesis, we'll move it on to the general point. Obviously short of doing huge demographic surveys we can't know if you're right or wrong and nor can we know what I'm about to say is either. But I find it useful to look at alternative possibilities that we can often be blind to, as we tend to look externally rather than internally.
Because different people come to the festival these days. That much is obvious. And they keep to themselves and don't engage with others or the rest of the festival. Sure. But why is that?
You can posit it's because they feel themselves superior, and WV and glamping are an expression of that, and you could be right.
But you look on this forum over every year and see the sheer amount of bile directed at people who "don't fit in with the festival ethos". Big tents, gazebos, Hunter wellies, chairs at stages, young people, people who watch lots of stuff at the pyramid, 'fake' hippy girls and on and on and on...
And I start to think that maybe the problem isn't that they don't want to engage, it's that they're not accepted by the people who claim to believe Glastonbury is all about togetherness because they're not doing it right. Maybe they would talk to more people if you spoke to them, rather than deciding their Hunter wellies means that they're people you wouldn't like.
Maybe.
I'll offer one piece of annecdotal evidence: girls with glitter in their hair and lines of mud painted on their face. Sure, it's lame, and yes, you'd probably be correct that they're quite middle class. But they've smudged mud on their face. Is there any more obvious express of "I want to belong!" ?
Maybe, just maybe, it's not about them not wanting to be involved, it's about us refusing to involve them. And maybe after a few years of that they learn to keep to themselves, watch the bands they enjoy, and find out how to love the festival on their own terms.
Maybe if there is a divide, it was caused by us, not them. And it's as much on us as it is them to break it back down again.
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DeanoL, you've made a series of well reasoned, well articulated, nuanced posts on this thread.
That was not one of them. Can you elaborate?
Sure. Minorities cause racism, if everyone in the UK were white, we would have no racism by default (we would fight about other stuff instead but that's beside the point). But you don't fix racism by outlawing black people, you fix it by changing the attitude of racists.
Same thing we have here. Glamping causes divisions, yes, but only because a small set of people want to pidgeonhole then discriminate against glampers. You don't fix it by eliminating glamping, you fix it by getting those people to grow the hell up.
Festival togetherness and community isn't a factor of where you sleep at night, it's about treating everyone as your equal. The very people preaching this are the ones trying to ruin it.
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Similarly there are plenty of folk who do camp in WV who are doing it because of perfectly sound reasons (see all those above about efc's rents)
BUT there are also many who do it because they see themselves as different from the dirty mass of robbing scum in the main camping. Some of them are in main camping, some are in glamping be it tipis, WV or any other option.
They ARE visible - they keep themselves distant, they don't join in they get mardy as hell if your dirty boot passes over their picnic blanket of pristine life
Where they camp is just an easy way to bunch them together.
But you've just acknowledged that its incorrect way to bunch then together because loads of them are in general camping and there's loads of sound people in WV.
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Indistinguishable apart from their freshly showered bodies and blow dried hair.
Glamping creates an unnecessary division it's undeniable. Why do you think there were reports of the people in the tipis getting heckled the year before last?
There are showers in crew camping, the backstage compound and ones available to everyone in the Greenpeace field. Try again.
Yes glamping does create a division but only in the same way black people create racism.
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Most of what is believed about Prince is pure tabloid style speculation. There have been many rumours (some of which have a little substance but are probably exaggerated) about him over the years and I very much doubt that many are worth paying credence to.
Perhaps, though I need to believe the Kevin Smith story is true. If you've not seen this before I hugely suggest giving it a go:
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It's a magical place and it takes something away when we aren't all in it together. Especially in the mud bath years. It's not easy sometimes. That's the point. Hauling your stuff in. Suffering a bit even with whatever conditions the weather is throwing at us. We dig deep and find it in ourselves to have a good time anyway, and learn things about ourselves, and if you aren't prepared to do that then you have missed the most important thing about Glastonbury.
People's ability to deal with the "suffering" will vary too. A mud bath doesn't mean we're all in it together - it means young, fit people will still be pretty much alright while those elderly and out of shape suffer.
Someone in our group this year did the festival on crutches. Not sure I could have done that myself, was genuinely impressed. At no point did she suggest that everyone else on site should break one of their feet too, so that we could all be in it together with her.
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more for me at least a frustration that many of them are missing a big bit of the point that a lot of people have alluded to here. that equality - the breaking down of that momentary "er what sort of freak am i about to talk to" that lets that community build so well
The people in WV don't spend the entire festival there! They come onto the site and once they're inside are entirely indistinguishable from anyone else.
No one is making the same argument about Camplite or the Tipi Villiage either, the other official glamping areas, because they're inside the fence.
People are literally judging based on which side of an entirely arbitrary fence you're on. WV even had an easy-pass-out system this year, making it far more "part of the festival" than the campervan fields. I'm positive the only reason Glastonbury didn't move the fence was that it was a bit of a faff, but I can certainly see that happening in future years, at which point this will all look very stupid.
All the West camping fields (Rivermead, Bushy, Pylon) were outside the fence at some point in the past too, so it's not even about geography or land. It's literally about a fence.
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Although I genuinely don't know what to I thinking about this hike in the minimum wage. Even given that it only applied for those over 25, I think I might like it. This is strange for me because I'm generally convinced that they're evil.
They are. The problem is they won this election on "paying off the country credit card". Remember they promised to clear the deficit in their last term, failed, and so ran this election on "give us two years to finish what we started". Now it's already become three years. And it's obvious why: if they do clear the deficit, they've got no election campaign for 2020. So we're going to get five years of these weird-ass Tory budgets that do a bit to fuck the poor and help the rich, but also don't introduce any huge spending cuts, lest we end up back in the black.
Either that or we'll do a war at some point to break the bank again.
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I think one of the reasons people take offence to those camping outside the festival is that there is a real sense of community at Glastonbury, which you just don't find at many other so called festivals, which in my opinion are just concerts in fields with camping. It's a magical place and it takes something away when we aren't all in it together. Especially in the mud bath years. It's not easy sometimes. That's the point. Hauling your stuff in. Suffering a bit even with whatever conditions the weather is throwing at us. We dig deep and find it in ourselves to have a good time anyway, and learn things about ourselves, and if you aren't prepared to do that then you have missed the most important thing about Glastonbury.
Why is being inside or outside of the fence the dividing line, that Beans on Toast song aside?
They have to suffer that hill, which would be bloody tough in mud bath years. They have showers, but there are showers on site too. I mean, don't the people in the Pennards have it easy? They're camped right in the middle of everything, can just saunter back to their tent in ten minutes if they want a change of clothes or a lie down, why don't they camp on the outskirts of the festival like the rest of us? Where it takes some effort?
People queue from bloody 4am in the morning to get the 'best' camping spots, so your notion that every spot inside the fence is somehow equal is clearly barmy!
Last time I checked WV and Tangerine fields are outside the fence. Hate is a really strong word to use. Don't think anyone has suggested that. Seems that you don't like people thinking it's weird that anyone would want to camp outside the festival.
You're right, but that's because I value the sense of community at Glastonbury and believe we're all in it together, and don't try and exclude people from that community based on where they choose to camp.
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Before Strummerville even came on to the festival the Strummer stone area used to be a brilliant place to sit and chat around a campfire with other random people. You don't have to get to the stone via the SE corner, you can reach it through the craft field so a small area could easily be opened up so people could get there.
And that stopped after it was stuck behind the queueing system in the rest of the SE corner. His campfire would have moved right there and then. I get what you're saying because I had the same reaction, but about five years ago. They can move the stone, it's the spirit of the thing that matters.
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This is the thing though, you don't have to 'worry' about anything camping in the main site. Everywhere is 'safe', you can ask the camping staff where the most space is (or just go on Torts guide prior) and the only camping equipment WV provides you with is a tent, which I've never heard anyone struggle to buy. Convincing first timers that it's best just to fork out the £400+ to stay at WV to ease themselves in to avoid some perceived 'stress' is crackers.
After my own experience, and reading the entirety of this thread, the only true advantage I can think WV has over the main site is that you can park a little closer to your tent, which just isn't a big deal to the vast majority of people who go to GF. With all the disadvantages I think it is crazy to spend that amount of money on it.
You know that, I know that, but perception and reality are two different things.
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There are lots and lots of people I'd like to see excluded from the festival. You must be crackers if you think everyone should be made welcome.
Do you really want to share the festival with
UKIP supporters
rapists
paedophiles
mike99
murderers
for example?
Not mike99 obviously, let's not be silly. But generally, yes, I would rather share the festival with dickheads in the hope that they can actually comprehend that there's a better way to live, and take that back with them.
The festival is not just full of nice people. But, on the whole, people at the festival tend to be nice. There are many people being lovely at Glastonbury who are awful human beings in their day jobs.
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Cool! Yes, that is a good idea.
I don't really get why people buy a cheap crappy tent every year though, surely it's nicer to spend a bit more on a good one that will last. Maybe that's the point, some people's mentality is just different.
You're assuming people go every year. For a lot of people they'll have no intention of every camping anywhere ever again once the festival is done.
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That may be true to an extent but are those in the likes of WV not to some extent excluding themselves by separating themselves from the great unwashed inside the fence?
Are they really? I can't say where someone sleeps of the night really bothers me, they're still part of the festival. And 1000s use the in-fence showers every year anyway. Are they missing out on an element of the festival? Sure. But if it's an element they don't enjoy...
I know people who bring camping stoves and tonnes of food with them, when for me trying the different, brilliant food stalls every year is a huge part of the festival experience. Others will have different preferences and there's nothing wrong with that.
Political equality @ Glasto...
in Chat
Posted
Right after the election someone said something to the affect of "can't believe that half the electorate basically just gambled on not getting injured or seriously ill"