jacobin magazine

i dunno it just felt so unnecessary. the baffler is not so huge a cultural force, on the left or generally, that it needs a cover-article takedown

the one in the new issue about going to parties and dreading having to talk about working in design might have been awful but i only read half of the first page

like, if frase wants to respond to franks OWS thing he should just do that

you can do this subject w/o 'the social function of student debt' etc.

sure but not if you're attempting to fold it into a 'larger critque' which i think is worth doing

the rhetoric of individualism is a plague

that's true but it's just a subject that needs someone better to do its larger critique. also it's lazy wrt addressing the causes of cost escalation etc. it's just a more complex subject than the author would like to believe.

xp he did though, but i guess you mean there was too much positioning? this was the best part imo

For all its mordant criticism of cultural studies, the Baffler was more in sync with its time than it liked to admit. It was in fact deeply postmodern, not in its explicit allegiances but in the way it partook of a certain cultural weather of the sort theorized by Fredric Jameson. The penchant for interpreting texts — seen in Frank’s privileging of books about Occupy over Occupy participants — mirrors the linguistic turn in academia.

*xps max

right he did but then why spend six paragraphs praising that stupid sex house piece and brag about albini or whatever? THAT was self serving for no real reason

i guess its sort of charming as an old-fashioned meaningless intra-left squabble but i had a very hard time getting through it

and giving props to gawker

i mean yeah the whole thing was basically: they are a bunch of cynical 90's dudes unfit for these times; cancel your baffler subscrip and gives us $$$ maybe it was shameless but i liked it

haha i dont want to be a subscriber to any magazine that will praise me

lol

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/our-fiscal-cliff/

like this was just absolute garbage. really stunningly bad + stupid

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/the-yacht-rock-counterrevolution/

― max, Tuesday, January 15, 2013 6:58 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

argh yes! hated this.

in fact I remember getting into a thing in the comments thread with the author I think, but now I don't see the comments

reads more like eager college student to me than gradschoolese xp

― flopson, Tuesday, January 15, 2013 6:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol there was a guy at my school who would show up several times per week in the editorial section of our newspaper, got a job at jacobin very quickly after graduating

'job'

really enjoying my jacobin subscription

comes with a football phone

started this thread just in time

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/books/bhaskar-sunkara-editor-of-jacobin-magazine.html?_r=0

new issue looks really tight http://jacobinmag.com/2013/08/issue-1112-preview-misery-index/

ian svenonius on tipping lol

claire potter B-)

Silent Majority Music

To put it most unkindly, trap music is adult contemporary for the prosumer age.

By Gavin Mueller

it made me genuinely happy to read that

ahhhhhh good htat sounds like it will make up for that fucking yacht rock article

lol

haha oh god of course Sc-tt McL*m** is going to be involved in this magazine and their books section. (i know for a fact he's a self googler because at least once i made a snide comment about an article of his in a location he would never be browsing by chance and he showed up to call me names). his work for the chronicle of higher ed is invariable the _worst_ and he manages to show up anywhere with a bit of radical buzz to be a wet blanket astonishingly consistently.

yeesh, guys

I can't figure out what happened

well incredibly someone made this explanatory and admittedly jacobin-friendly-leaning series of images

http://i.imgur.com/ZQRrxnM.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/C9XjqfY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2eDzzfY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/JCkQmFP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/4bcbxRW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/3OArP2J.jpg

Jesus that did not help

I can't even stand to read all that, but good job making sure the Left continues to resemble high school guys.

wtf

i saw that some twitterstorm was happening but didn't bother trying to piece it together, seemingly one of the better decisions i've ever made.

simplified version:

i mean from my perspective jacobin made a big editorial mistake by linking to a tweet about such a sensitive topic without seeking permission first--they fixed that mistake in less than 30 minutes and were contrite. another jacobin staffer who had nothing to do with the article stepped up to bat to defend the decision to link to the tweet, and bat back at kendzior's claim that the article mocked her. then it was 4 solid days of internet warfare between kendzior's crew & jacobin people, with ongoing exaggerations and misrepresentations and bad faith arguments on all sides. so fucking nasty.

yuck

I'm glad to be on ILX where nothing like that ever happens

hahahaha

i mean i think the throughline here is kendzior misreading things other people are saying about her--like her incredible misreading of stoker's piece, which was about people (like K) attacking the author of the article & the odious tactic of enforcing 'left discipline' via character assassination, which Kendzior somehow reads and passes on as 'stoker says i should be disciplined through character assassination.'

idk like stoker has been one of my favorite writers for years since a minister friend directed me to her, even when i think she's wrong i've been impressed by her empathy and thoughtfulness, so to see her sucked into this and smeared as a rape apologist based on something she didn't even say is such a disheartening microcosm of this whole weird blowup.

i should start writing for jacobin and people can accuse me of being Eugene Debs

jacobin clusterfuck summary corner

so to see her sucked into this and smeared as a rape apologist based on something she didn't even say is such a disheartening microcosm of this whole weird blowup.

Yeah man, the Internet. What can you do. It sucks

The bro bash piece is a good read though

Firing off bro-mots at the brodeo is not only great fun, it’s therapeutic — a helpful coping mechanism for professional or social environments in which the boyish and brutish dominate. When it’s not stifling or annoying, intellectual machismo feels, at the very least, comically anachronistic in our modern, enlightened circles. Like men who still wear wristwatches or take overly rustic vacations, these affectations hardly warrant female attention, let alone the respect they’re designed to command.

Men who still wear wristwatches? What horseshit

I loled

I also liked the image of the aw shucks blogger snapping their suspenders to avoid charges of elitism

Lawyers wear wristwatches partly because you can't bring phones into some courthouses.

Also because they need to have a bigger watchface than the guy next to them

Put bluntly, Warren is turning her campaign into a policy factory because she’s had trouble inspiring people with a broad-strokes political vision the way her closest ideological competitor, Bernie Sanders, has.

iow, she hasn't generated enough popular enthusiasm to rise in the polls, yet. you can figure that part out by looking at the polls.

But we shouldn’t see her policy blitz purely as a sign of strength. It may actually be an SOS message, a panicked response to her campaign’s shortcomings in the field of mass politics.

(my bolding)

To say that these policies are being delineated because she thinks this will help her generate more enthusiasm is just the author drawing that rather simplified conclusion and asserting it as true. Presidential campaigns are complex and multiform and notoriously difficult to win. This article is the usual weak-assed punditry as most campaign reporting. Where it is right, it is stating the obvious. Where it is adventurous, it is empty speculation. Call back in a year.