Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

o hai larry appleton

― he tasted like mouth (bizarro gazzara), Thursday, July 20, 2017 2:49 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah. all is clear now. the narcissistic fantasist has logged on

fairly even handed outline
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/20/the-millennial-lefts-war-against-liberalism/?utm_term=.1f4cf4d7eb55

ah. all is clear now. the narcissistic fantasist has logged on

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Thursday, July 20, 2017 12:57 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you call PTSD being a "fantasist", fair enough. Not surprising from people who LOL at calling other people "retards".

I guess my deal with Chapo boys is they're the wrong direction, IMO. It's Felix's game, and he's basically a new wave Bill Maher. One of my own ideas is, for example, taking assertive action to make penance for slavery and racism against black people, for a large variety of humane, ethical, and practical reasons. It's amazing to me that we still haven't done this yet. Top priority.

Instead, we have these dudes who punch and beat at weak targets and empower themselves on the backs of others. On top of stacking left organizations with their numbskull followers. And are hailed as the new face of the left. Not a big fan of that. Guess I just take it all too seriously.

"Around 15,000 people pay $5 per month for weekly subscriber-only episodes"

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/324417-maddows-trumps-tax-return-reveal-delivers-41-million-viewers-for-msnbc

Despite the URL, that's 4.1 million

I like the WaPo piece. But I think they're flying way too close to the sun. Felix's Frum tweet is obv nagl, and it's a sign of things to come - if he's flipping out that much over a fairly mild critique by Jeet, I suspect another tweet or quote from the show will sink them and lead more and more people to dismiss them. Glenn Beck was a sensation for a year or so and then he flamed out. I disagree that "Felix is Chapo" - like someone said upthread, Matt and Amber are the ones that articulate the ideology of the show and have the most substantive things to say. They may have gotten a lot of young people to go to DSA meetings after the election and exposed those kids to leftist ideas, but Whiney's right, their reach is grossly exaggerated. Jacobin and Occupy are just as responsible for surging leftist movement as CTH.

just ftr i kept hearing about this surging DSA membership and apparently it has surged to 24,000 dues paying members. which isn't to say that it won't continue to "exponentially" grow but when the exponential growth is from 6,000 to 24,000 it is a huge increase in % but still a pretty small real number.

True - but that doesn't take into account everyone that loved Bernie and was fucking livid at HRC, DWS, and the DNC for knee-capping him in the primaries, even if he had his blindspots with black voters. Been said upthread but his campaign (like Trump's) didn't start out with an aim to win. Most of those people aren't joining the DSA or even aware of it. There is a large & growing voting bloc that is sympathetic to leftist ideas.

i don't disagree. just think DSA membership is maybe not the most accurate measure of that sentiment.

I agree, but a four-fold increase in membership, even if it's just 24,000 people, shows that hitherto unviable positions are gaining support, even if it's runoff compared to the more mainstream enthusiasm for Bernie's socialism-lite.

that washington post article barely mentions the 2008 financial collapse until the second to last paragraph. you want to know why millennials are down on capitalism? its because their formative experience with it was watching it spectacularly fail, hurt a fuck ton of people, saw the people who were responsible for it totally bailed out and people who had nothing to do with it slapped with crushing austerity.

for a lot of people my age (33 this week) i know that the combination of the iraq war and the financial crisis has completely coloured our worldview

carpet_kaiser at 10:53 19 Jul 17

Nah, I joined the Communist Party when I was 12 years old, and parted pretty quickly after. I've got my own political philosophy worked out, which isn't something you can guess at.

best Mussolini impersonation I've seen without an anime avi

I'm 38 so I'm lucky. I was able to get into the job market and have a good base of skills built up when the bloodletting began. My wife is your age and was basically just hitting the job market when lehman exploded.

that washington post article barely mentions the 2008 financial collapse until the second to last paragraph. you want to know why millennials are down on capitalism? its because their formative experience with it was watching it spectacularly fail, hurt a fuck ton of people, saw the people who were responsible for it totally bailed out and people who had nothing to do with it slapped with crushing austerity.

― officer sonny bonds, lytton pd (mayor jingleberries), Thursday, July 20, 2017 1:54 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for a lot of people my age (33 this week) i know that the combination of the iraq war and the financial crisis has completely coloured our worldview

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Thursday, July 20, 2017 1:55 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm... I'm 24 and 9/11 was the formative experience of my world view... obviously it all starts there: endless war, incomprehensible amounts of money lost or wasted, incompetent and outright evil politicians, total confusion and frittering away of all good will we had on 9/12... I barely remember the Pax Americana of the 90's.

I like the WaPo piece. But I think they're flying way too close to the sun. Felix's Frum tweet is obv nagl, and it's a sign of things to come - if he's flipping out that much over a fairly mild critique by Jeet, I suspect another tweet or quote from the show will sink them...
― flappy bird, Thursday, 20 July 2017 17:31 (fifty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this happened in the UK, on a much smaller scale, quite recently with the realpolitik podcast, where the young lads tweeted something p.stupid and then got a full takedown doxxing in the daily mail

carpet_kaiser at 10:53 19 Jul 17

Nah, I joined the Communist Party when I was 12 years old, and parted pretty quickly after. I've got my own political philosophy worked out, which isn't something you can guess at.

best Mussolini impersonation I've seen without an anime avi

Nah, it's based on the Franciscan Catholic teachings I grew up on. Radical compassion, tolerance, acceptance, charity, sacrifice, etc. I'm an atheist now, but that forms the basis of my worldview. Better get that anime AVI going.

You guys are doing a bad job at figuring me out.

a riddle wrapped in an idiot

are you bigger than a bread line?

xxp i think the joke is that mussolini was a communist b4 he became a fascist - pretty good ref imo

I guess my deal with Chapo boys is they're the wrong direction, IMO. It's Felix's game, and he's basically a new wave Bill Maher.

You keep saying this and everyone who actually pays attention to this keeps pointing to the other four hosts and how 3/4 of them are more fundamental to the podcast.

it's weird he gets attention for calling people tards and dicksuckers like it's 1988 when he's so next level. suck it libs.

Suddenly I feel lucky for being formed by Vietnam and Watergate

"we have learned well the simple lesson of vietnam: stay out of vietnam"

what's chapo's line on john stewart/colbert/maddow

the above heinous felix tweet appears to be ripping off colbert's jokes

You guys are doing a bad job at figuring me out.

― carpet_kaiser, Thursday, 20 July 2017 18:36 (two hours ago) Permalink

https://cdn-webimages.wimages.net/0511fab616163b9502673d1eff6beacf0f9074-wm.jpg?v=3

Suddenly I feel lucky for being formed by Vietnam and Watergate

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Thursday, July 20, 2017 8:47 PM (thirty-two minutes ago)

mort sahl is wittier than these guys for sure

what's chapo's line on john stewart/colbert/maddow

afaict (and i may be off base here) - feckless, smug snark monkeys who were suspiciously chill with adult-in-the-room Obama's neocon-lite fp and neolib domestic policies. and they're not necessarily wrong, but sometimes they can go a little hard on highly visible ppl who are/ could be very sympathetic to a dem socialist movement.

now if they wanna bag on the Chaits and yasss kween Clintonistas on twitter who just long for "decency" then i'm all for a good duck hunt.

perfectly okay with 'republican said a thing' humor falling by wayside

Fwiw, Felix did apologize for his dumb posts and mentioned how he's bad at reacting:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/6oc45o/im_a_chapo_fan_but_this_is_not_great_right/dkglzpx/

are you bigger than a bread line?

― President Keyes, Thursday, July 20, 2017 2:45 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I laughed

I think this is the first time I've seen any of them apologize for anything

(that was definitely a good time to apologize)

I know it's a deep cut but it's hard think of Felix as a homophobe after hearing his solo Les Misrables episode. Sure, that tweet was bad and he sometimes his schtick blurs the Bro/ironic Bro line too much but I don't think it goes a lot further.

the Les Mis thing was one of my faves. I wish they'd do more earnest appreciations of things

that washington post article barely mentions the 2008 financial collapse until the second to last paragraph. you want to know why millennials are down on capitalism? its because their formative experience with it was watching it spectacularly fail, hurt a fuck ton of people, saw the people who were responsible for it totally bailed out and people who had nothing to do with it slapped with crushing austerity.

The trend has always been younger people feeling something similar to this (the New Left was as anti-capitalist as the Dirtbag Left) but they eventually shift rightward over time as they get good jobs and start families and so on, so I don't think the opinions of young people are all that different from previous generations. Whether this generation will see the economic recovery/shift of those slacker nogoodnik Gen Xers who became just like their parents is the big question - or will it just remain shitty overall and keep them favorable to leftist ideologies?

I agree with all that, nothing new under the sun. But what I do see, just anecdotally, is a shift back toward a young left that really wants to understand and engage in politics and not just rally and disrupt.

lol wait that felix apology is for an entirely different thing than the Frum tweet

I think he mentions it in the thread

that washington post article barely mentions the 2008 financial collapse until the second to last paragraph. you want to know why millennials are down on capitalism? its because their formative experience with it was watching it spectacularly fail, hurt a fuck ton of people, saw the people who were responsible for it totally bailed out and people who had nothing to do with it slapped with crushing austerity.
The trend has always been younger people feeling something similar to this (the New Left was as anti-capitalist as the Dirtbag Left) but they eventually shift rightward over time as they get good jobs and start families and so on, so I don't think the opinions of young people are all that different from previous generations. Whether this generation will see the economic recovery/shift of those slacker nogoodnik Gen Xers who became just like their parents is the big question - or will it just remain shitty overall and keep them favorable to leftist ideologies?

― El Tuomasbot (milo z), Thursday, July 20, 2017 6:10 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the thing with millennials (or at least my cohort of old millennials) is that it seems we are actually not going to have as good jobs as our parents (or Gen X), we're not going to necessarily own our own homes, our jobs will be more precarious and we will change them more often, we're going to retire later and die sooner. we're going to be the first generation that is worse off than the one before it in living memory.

otoh have read things that the generation after millennials are seeming to be quite right-wing and not as attached to democratic and liberal ideas :/

slacker nogoodnik Gen Xers who became just like their parents

wait waht

we're going to be the first generation that is worse off than the one before it in living memory

AHEM

feelin like I gotta push back on some misconceptions about my generation here

rogerdaltrey.gif

malkmus.gif

I'm late X or XY cusp or whatever, so my generation too.

Xennial or Oregon Trail Generation can fuck right off tho

Every stereotypical thing ppl trot out about Millenials - that they're lazy/directionless/distracted, that their economics prospects suck, that they're reliant on their parents - was originally levelled at Generation X (and, if you dig back far enough, at boomers too).

But the fact is the Boomers reaped the benefits of the massive post-war boom, ate the world, and left the rest of us to swim in their shit. Gen X's economic prospects declined relative to Boomers, and Millenials' have declined likewise. Gen Xers have higher salaries relative to Boomers when they were the same age, but have fewer assets and greater debt. Millenials have even less, given that they haven't started saving money and can't buy houses etc.

On a personal level, at this point in my life my parents had owned three houses, half a dozen cars, had substantial savings for their childrens' college educations, and were getting by on two salaries. I own one house, which I only managed to get (very luckily) through a municipal gov't low-income housing program lottery, we have one car for my family of 4, are getting by on just my one salary, and our savings are meager to non-existent. My parents lived in the 'burbs, I live in a substantially different urban environment. I would not say it is accurate that I "became just like my parents".

That was my point about "slacker no-goodnik" Gen Xers. They were attacked similarly, but eventually fell into line.

That you didn't turn out just like your parents doesn't mean the generation as a whole didn't come to resemble the Boomers more than the early '90s version was thought to be headed - and appears to be headed toward more traditional success than the following generation. Could a millennial you buy a house in SF under any circumstances today?