Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

centrists have lost ground and accomplished modest gains at best

As timid as it might seem to single-payer diehards (myself included), the ACA was much more than a modest gain.

^this^ is true.

Chapo is successful because FINALLY the left has something visceral like Limbaugh.

― flappy bird

nobody remembers bob lassiter.

imagine if, like, kevin williamson had written shit like that, they'd probably do a 'reading series' of it

this is otm, flopson otm upthread too. i feel like CTH has become a weird stand-in for "the left" on twitter for moderates; they are really eager to take it down even though, like I said upthread, CTH is not even that popular. I honestly just wish moderates would at least try to do stick it to Chapo with humor and ridicule instead of "how dare these dirtbags!" moralizing, which gets super-annoying.

xpost i agree w/that and i have no interest in them or cum town as podcasts but whenever reactionaries use that to smear the faint revival of actual (diverse) leftist energy i feel like going to war for them

Also this feels otm to me, as shown by the fact that there were like 4 separate explanations of what Will meant on this thread, even though it was pretty easy to understand from the Macleans article. fwiw i think the "bend the knee" quote makes him sound like a dipshit LARPer with psychosexual dominance issues, the exact type of dude they LOVE to mock, even if i think he's right on the merits.

and fwiw I think Will's twitter thread shows the CTH guys have a far better understanding of the place of their place the "far left" than their critics do. it feels weird that their critics are always coming at them like these podcast dudes are a gigantic threat or something.

If the Tea Party were what it claimed to be (grassroots rather than astroturfed), it would hardly be a horrible thing for Democrats to have - managed to get a fair number of people elected IIRC.

― El Tuomasbot (milo z)

yes, the end goal is to get people _elected_, who gives a shit whether or not they can actually _govern_?

fwiw i think the "bend the knee" quote makes him sound like a dipshit LARPer with psychosexual dominance issues, the exact type of dude they LOVE to mock, even if i think he's right on the merits.

lmao nailed it

i think chapo is one hell of a lot better than left Rush Limbo tbh. that would be like if idk, counterpunch or some of the leftish parts of zero hedge had a podcast. chapo are still fundamentally grounded in reality

makes him sound like a dipshit LARPer with psychosexual dominance issues

from my perspective, to be fair, almost everybody who performs politics on Twitter sounds this way, all those chapo guys to be sure, but peter daoouou and adam parmashenko and etc and etc. (and of course thousands of right-wing goons) it's pretty fucking depressing

wow really doing a close reading of (What appeared to be) an off-the-cuff remark on a comedy podcast.

anyway, Will's right. if the Dems want to keep 'compromising' with a bunch of corporatocrats and white nationalists AND KEEP LOSING not sure why 'the Left' should come to heel

I still haven't heard this podcast, would the people on it make fun of an off-the-cuff remark

yes, the end goal is to get people _elected_, who gives a shit whether or not they can actually _govern_?

I don't get the "they can't govern" stuff anyway - we fundamentally disagree with how the right governs but they're still doing it. All across the country they've been highly effective at pushing their agenda - that's "governing."

imagine if, like, kevin williamson had written shit like that, they'd probably do a 'reading series' of it
― global tetrahedron, Saturday, July 15, 2017 2:11 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well yeah, they'd find that way of speaking laughable when used in defense of ideas they find laughable.

I don't get the "they can't govern" stuff anyway - we fundamentally disagree with how the right governs but they're still doing it. All across the country they've been highly effective at pushing their agenda - that's "governing."

― El Tuomasbot (milo z)

yes. so much winning. if only we could win like they are winning.

so much winning. if only we could win like they are winning.

If you don't see the ways they are winning ground for their agenda, you just aren't looking very closely. Trump's incompetence and the stalemate over ACA repeal are only single pieces of what the right wing has done to US and state policies and is still doing all across the country.

their "agenda" at this point - and i agree with you that they have been tremendously successful at implementing it - seems to be the accumulation of power for power's sake and the systematic dismantlement of democratic norms and institutions. i don't spend a lot of time looking at the american right wing and asking myself why we aren't doing what they're doing.

this is not to say that i don't think winning elections is _important_ or that we shouldn't learn tactical lessons from the way the republicans have twisted american democracy to fit their beliefs, only that such things are necessary but not sufficient.

That someone apparently believes Dems are compromising with white nationalists and asking the left to "come to heel" probably a good indication the discourse is of shit right now.

"if the Dems want to keep 'compromising' with a bunch of corporatocrats and white nationalists AND KEEP LOSING not sure why 'the Left' should come to heel"

asking the left to "come to heel"

establishment Dems' positioning of Perez over Ellison was perceived my many on the left that they weren't willing to make any concessions to the Sanders wing, I don't think it's that much of a leap to get to this

*by many

it feels weird that their critics are always coming at them like these podcast dudes are a gigantic threat or something.

― intheblanks, Saturday, July 15, 2017 4:57 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think a lot of it comes from jealousy. they're making 70k a month with virtually no overhead. & chapo's success isn't the threat, it's what their success means: an ascendant young leftist movement.

Xpost
I was angry about Perez's entrance into the race too. I really wanted Ellison to win. They tried to concede by giving him the deputy chair role (and that's pathetic if they thought that would mitigate things) and Schumer did go to bat for him in a big way and also asked Bernie to serve as the party's outreach chair.
People really should not broadstroke "Dems" as a whole this way though, even if you are referring to party leadership "elites" or whatever. It essentially functions as an attack on voters, alienates allies.

'Come to heel' is more a reflection of the post-2000 and 2016 "vote for whatever we have to offer OR ELSE" stance. No matter how shitty the Democrat in any given race may be, you better support them. This negates the possibility of moving leftward as a whole, because without the ability to withhold votes/support, the left has nothing to offer the Democratic party. No one's hiring lobbyists to support Medicare for all.

it is not in democrats' nature to rule by fear, nor are they in a position to. do they seriously think asking people to "come to heel" while offering them nothing in return, not even empty promises, will help them out?

don't follow american politics quite as closely as UK but from what I do see the menaker quote does seem quite punchy & posturing given the relative position of the left w/in the dems. sure, they have the candidate, and they have the analysis, but do they have control of the party? genuine qn. from what I gather the dems are likely to line up in 2020 with their centrist have_you_seen_the_other guy analysis behind some sort of bookerberg candidate. from a UK perspective, even if you do have control of the party, wouldn't expect the centrists to bend the knee w/out a fight

establishment Dems' positioning of Perez over Ellison was perceived my many on the left

Serious question: what percentage of Democrats in the US know who the chair of the DNC is, or even know that this position exists, let alone care which of these two people held it?

I just feel like I talk about politics all the time and am around left-wing people who talk politics all the time and people sure did talk about Bernie and Hillary and people sure are talking about the attack on Medicaid and about Trump being a crook but I just didn't hear people talking about this

Twitter is dumb and makes this worse

Rather, it makes _things_ worse

I should know, I'm on it a lot. Subscribe to cat feeds and @corgibot, folks, makes it better by a ton

The interesting bit of potential CTH hypocrisy will be if they fail to mention, or find some way to downplay or excuse, the Ames/Taibbi abuse stuff. Because there's absolutely no doubt that if any noteworthy person to their right had this kind of thing in their past, they'd jump all over it. And people in their Twitter circle have been talking about it recently (e.g. onetime guest Kath Barbadoro), so there's no way they haven't heard about it coming up again.

I can imagine them never bringing it up, though if it reaches some kind of critical mass (eg Taibbi gets sacked) I can't imagine they'd spring to his defense, either. Not exactly Profiles In Courage but he's also not on their payroll

the new one with Tim Heidecker is actually pretty good, off to a slow and somewhat embarrassing start (Matt talking about the "platonic ideal" of fountain sodas), but unlike the first episode with Tim they have good chemistry and there's lots of great riffing on Trump not comprehending humor or metaphorical language, that awful Sully movie, John Kasich's shitty new book...

a slow and somewhat embarrassing start (Matt talking about the "platonic ideal" of fountain sodas)

I loved this.

On that reddit thread about the Taibbi/Ames book there were so many guys saying, "We have to tell Chapo about this." I'm going to guess at least one of the CTH guys has read that book already.

I hadn't read that Taibbi/Ames excerpt before and goddamn it's depressing, where do these people come from whose life is so tightly focused on "look how I'm not an UPTIGHT LITTLE BITCH like SOME PEOPLE", repeated endlessly, an impulse never satisfied

Yeah, I figure part of the reason for the lack of comment (not just on the show, but anywhere) is that they can't credibly claim not to have known about it. In which case their choices are to say nothing, or admit that they knew and didn't think it was a big enough deal to keep them from having Taibbi on the show.

This is an interesting test case for the concept of the "dirtbag left", which I take it is based on the idea that it's possible, and probably better, for the left not be too hung up on PC niceties. We know that, in CTH's case, that means you can be a sincere socialist who calls things retarded, jokes about working at a racism factory, and issues ironic calls to free Jared Fogle. This situation suggests that it also means you can be a sincere socialist while knowingly associating yourself with a guy who bragged about sexually abusing female employees, in the pages of a book where a close colleague bragged about things that were even worse. That's another level of un-PC permissiveness that, clearly, not all of their fanbase is comfortable with.

Meanwhile, of course, right-wingers' sexual pathologies are the key to everything.

I know the book came out a long time ago, but isn't it plausible that they didn't know about it before they had him on? (he guested several months ago iirc) when I bumped this thread it was the first I'd heard of it, and I work in media and read Taibbi and spend too much time on twitter. None of my coworkers were aware of it. I agree that having him on if they knew about this shit would be inexcusable.

or rather, when I bumped the Taibbi thread...

I listened to cum town god help me, seemed abt half as smart, half as funny as cth

We know that, in CTH's case, that means you can be a sincere socialist who calls things retarded, jokes about working at a racism factory, and issues ironic calls to free Jared Fogle.

I wonder if this is a way for them to denude the power of the erstwhile tumblr left's 'crybullying' by plowing through it with irony and counteract this effect: But aside from such direct symbiosis, Nagle suspects — rightly in my view — that the real damage of the “Tumblrization of left-politics” may have been to spur a “brain drain from the left,” as people fled from a political brand increasingly associated with hysteria, witch-hunting, and intolerance of dissent. http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/07/angela-nagles-kill-all-normies-the-alt-right-and-4chan.html

re: taibbi, my suspicion is they turn a blind eye (i) because he is their pal, (ii) he is one of the most credible and high profile left voices in america, and (iii) self-censoring so as not to be seen as 'siding with the enemy'

But that's just it--"the enemy" in this case would have to include some of their own friends and political fellow travelers, no matter what side they take.

Another part of this is that I don't think anyone can honestly say that they know what to do in situations like this. Even if this particular case seems clear, the general questions that it raises--about when to ostracize people for past behavior, when to trust that someone has reformed, how to weigh personal misdeeds against the value of good political work, etc.--are difficult, maybe intractable.

So talking about this at all would be off-brand for CTH for a couple of reasons: because it's not funny, and also because their approach relies on assuming a degree of political/moral certainty, and that's not available here.

Add in the fear of alienating people inclined to defend Taibbi, and Taibbi himself, and you've got a situation tailor-made for them to ignore in the hopes that it blows over. But that would be totally spineless.

I don't entirely get what IIIIII is trying to say, but I feel pretty comfortable claiming that bragging about sexually abusing women will result in a bigger 'brain drain' from a political movement than 'tumblrization'

If they were going to tackle the Taibbi thing I imagine it would be done via Twitter rather than the show itself.

I doubt that any of them have read the book itself (unless one does now) - Felix is pretty specifically only interested in the Middle East and Napoleon, Matt does history, Will doesn't seem to reference much beyond literary fiction, Amber is more social theory-y stuff.

Also they're young as shit. Tweens or not even circa 9/11.

Most of them are their mid-30's, Felix is 27 or 28. You don't remember Will's 9/11 story, when he was a freshman in college?

I thought he said he was a freshman in high school.

nah he was smoking pot in his dorm room

That Nagle quote is dumb. There's not a brain drain from the left, there's a brain drain from arguing about stupid shit on tumblr (or at least there should be).

I knew about Ames/Taibbi, but that's because a friend is a major fanboy and read that book.

I hadn't read that Taibbi/Ames excerpt before and goddamn it's depressing, where do these people come from whose life is so tightly focused on "look how I'm not an UPTIGHT LITTLE BITCH like SOME PEOPLE", repeated endlessly, an impulse never satisfied

Sadly I think this was probably a big part of the reason they went to Russia in the first place. Dudes did some great journalism but basically fuck them.

Enjoyed this episode, including soda fountain talk. Kasich stuff is gold, alt right comedy dude beef got a bit embarassingly Internet Hardman towards the end but the actual excerpts of his stuff were great.

the long-awaited Jeet take on Chapo

https://newrepublic.com/article/143926/dirtbag-left-problem-dominance-politics