Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

so not gonna happen

she's been off for a while, several months at least

amber otm

did we acknowledge anywhere on ILX the whole Freddy DeBoer situation this week

deboer being a total nightmare person didn't surprise me in particular

what happened? saw aftermath but couldn't piece it together. seems he had a mental break of some kind?

yeah i only was vaguely aware of whatever it was, what happened

this was sort of illuminating but i still don't get what happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/6uokm9/can_someone_explain_all_the_leftist_twitter_drama/

more or less:

Freddie accused someone from Viewpoint Mag of date rape. Then a bunch of people started dragging on Amber, Angela Nagle, and Zero Books for their takes on antifa . And Katie Harper ranted for hours....

Deboer got into a tiff with Malcom Harris after Harris retweeted a link to an article criticizing Deboer and some other writers. Deboer flipped out and baselessly accused Harris of rape then deleted all of his tweets. He subsequently wrote a blog post announcing that he was leaving social media and getting help for his mental health problems. He did not apologize for the accusations.

X-post

this is callous but i don't really buy deBoer's mental illness thing, he's just an angry self-righteous dick. like he didn't even apologize to malcolm harris or retract his accusation

so not gonna happen

Looool

xp- like if you baselessly slimed someone in a manic episode, wouldn't you retract the accusation once you'd calmed down?

when Sady Doyle is asking for folks to lay off BONERS while he's seeking inpatient care, I'm inclined to buy in. There was also some decent back-and-forth in the comments on this LGM thread re: asshole behavior and mental illness: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/08/on-freddie

He can be mentally ill AND a self-righteous dick

Maybe he believes what he said about Malcolm Harris and only acknowledges that, in the absence of proof, it was inappropriate for him to talk about it. He must have been referring to a specific incident

Also Freddie DeBoer, Amber A'Lee Frost, and Angela Nagle are all much more interesting than Malcolm Harris.

Oh god

Freddie DeBoer is not interesting.

yeah hey speaking of which i saw Angela Nagle get a lot of heat on left twitter about her book, wtf was that all about? she's giving a platform to fascism by writing about it? that's ridiculous. i was just disappointed that the book was so short & full of typos as someone pointed out way upthread. i remember someone called her transphobic - what?

The typos were apparently due to the initial run going out with the wrong copy or some such, it was fixed after the first 5000 or something.

I would think the line against Nagle is her stance against no-platforming, which tbh I think is fairly argued on her part

gotcha

People also seemed object to her dispassioante analysis of the factors that contributed to the rise of the alt right, claiming that she "blamed" the excesses of the social justice left for them and things like that

I don't buy that either tbh

Me neither. I liked the book a lot.

Also Freddie DeBoer, Amber A'Lee Frost, and Angela Nagle are all much more interesting than Malcolm Harris.

― Treeship, Wednesday, August 23, 2017 6:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jesus christ

i now regret knowing about any of this

Also Freddie DeBoer, Amber A'Lee Frost, and Angela Nagle are all much more interesting than Malcolm Harris.

― Treeship, Wednesday, August 23, 2017 6:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't even like Malcolm Harris, but i felt bad for him. especially hypocritical of FdB, who has written this type of shpiel a million times:

I read about the PWR BTTM accusations. They’re disturbing. I take them seriously. But these guys have had their careers erased overnight, and the idea that we have any responsibility to give them the chance to defend themselves is treated like you took part in their alleged crimes. You simply cannot say, in polite society, “basic fairness requires us to avoid a rush to judgment and to give people the right to respond to accusations.” To do so gets you lumped in with the criminals. Like a friend of mine said, “the only acceptable reaction to an accusation is enthusiastic and unqualified acceptance."

to have lobbed that at him

I believe I saw Leslie Lee III have a twitter exchange w Keith Ellison actually July 2016 sometime. I forget how it started but Ellison tried to convince him to vote for Hillary, reminding him that the Supreme Court was a thing, to no avail of course he voted for Stein ultimately.

Lmao so angela nagle is a Spiked writer who done played everyone- most spectacularly Mr Chapo, although perhaps there's a slight excuse with them being American and not picking up on some British Isles nuances.

My favourite bit is when she sneers at young women who claim to have ptsd despite not having been in a war- gee, I can't think of any highly traumatic experience frequently suffered by young women, drawing a complete blank here, they must just be hysterical hypochondriacs.

Angela nagl, basically

Also (and just jotting notes here really) broader issue of right wingers both fetishising military and police and at the same time making ridicule of ptsd a cornerstone of their rhetoric- <puzzled face emoji>

all these people are assholes and the worst to attach leftism to

well idk any shit about amber i think she's fine

I haven't taken issue with anything any of the main dry folk have said save Felix.

I have no idea what this Nagle stuff is about.

Lmao so angela nagle is a Spiked writer who done played everyone- most spectacularly Mr Chapo, although perhaps there's a slight excuse with them being American and not picking up on some British Isles nuances.

My favourite bit is when she sneers at young women who claim to have ptsd despite not having been in a war- gee, I can't think of any highly traumatic experience frequently suffered by young women, drawing a complete blank here, they must just be hysterical hypochondriacs.

Angela nagl, basically

― The Adventures Of Whiteman (Bananaman Begins), Wednesday, August 23, 2017 11:25 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

angela nagle has had one piece published in spiked as far as i can tell from a quick google.

i take issue with a few of the arguments people have said she makes including the one you mention (I haven't read the book), but she does seem to know a lot about the alt-right and I've enjoyed some things she written about them. also while her "tumblr sjws precipitated the alt-right" thesis is on the face of it a bit of an objectionable and victim blaming argument, the alt-right is a reactionary movement which absolutely feeds on identity politics and dances around it gleefully like a maypole flinging their feces at it. you only need to see how many column inches on breitbart are wasted on "university bans yoga class because of appropriation" or the amount of pepe twitter bios that poke fun at pronoun preferences to see how central trolling and excoriating the "unmanly, decadent, derange, sjws" is to their identity and weltanschauung and sense of identity.

(my pet-theory for the rise of the alt-right is that the realm of the political is necessarily antagonistic and involves identifying with a group and being against an enemy. the move towards consensus in the political class on issues such as the economy and international affairs has led to the feeling that the two major parties are two sides of the same coin - however inaccurate that may be - which has lead to that necessary antagonism, group identification, and enemy formation leeching out in the form of white identity politics)

yeah jim^ that seems so much more otm & explains both phenomena

I don't think Nagle is "victim-blaming" in her book - she's pretty even-handed about some of the hysteria within that community. I also don't think she equates both sides or condemns tumblr as if they're as bad as the alt-right.

could also argue that with a lack of religion in peoples lives this kind of shit replaces the moralizing group think antagonizing that ol' time religion used to provide an outlet for

oh man, yes, that's a whole other fascinating topic... the religious impulse remains in us even in the absence of God/organized religion... & the way that void is filled is just endlessly fascinating to me...

btw can anyone offer a brief explanation of that fucking corncob & donut thing? even after listening to the latest premium ep, I still don't completely understand it, other than being psyched that Neera Tanden got owned on twitter.

corncob is a drill tweet

"im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob

— wint (@dril) November 11, 2011

the intersection between left twitter and weird twitter means that when some left twitter dirtbag is dragging some centrist lib and their target is getting mad they will make reference to that tweet.

Hilaryman Al Giordano stated that the reference to corncob was an allusion to sticking a corncob up someone's ass and so was homophobic and violent language. left twitter lost their shit at this and found it funnier than hell. people started to put corncob emojis in their display names etc.

the donut thing was unrelated but sort of the lib equivalent of the corncob thing https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/our-revolution-has-a-problem-with-the-dictatorial-arrogant?utm_term=.uuNgzBdPM#.hgwybz7Vg

wow that is awesome

https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/d338qj/corncob-donut-binch-a-guide-to-weird-leftist-internet-slang

The targeting of Angela Nagle was something I took as a continuation of the shit Mark Fisher got years back when he first wrote about how shitty Tumblrati types could get, esp since both Nagle & Fisher are published by the same company, and Angela explicitly talks about her work as trying to continue on Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" essay.

Totally.

I wonder what Matt's ILM user name is

Being a poptimist is tough. You gotta figure out which songs written by middle-aged Scandinavian men are EVERYTHING and which ones are TRASH

— Matt Christman (@cushbomb) August 25, 2017

he and matthew perpetua could be brothers

meanwhile, felix has earned the wrath of the nofap community

Hey @ByYourLogic, how dare you tarnish the reputation of the NoFap community!https://t.co/il0BMvkVg9 pic.twitter.com/S60NhiEVwq

— Ryan Smith (@RyanSmithWriter) August 24, 2017

nofap guy sounds really wound up

I like Felix's obit for Rich Piana

http://deadspin.com/rich-piana-lived-as-big-as-he-was-1798428768

how does nagle stack up to the gabriella coleman book?