Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

i was bullied frequently in 5th/6th grade and i took one of my bullies to adjudication once. it turned out that it was just another popularity contest and they sided with the bully and asked me if i could see how i had invited the bullying on myself through my annoying behavior. anyway i got into a fist fight with him a month later at the tetherball court and ended up winning and that worked much better he never bothered me afterwards.

this story is sad lol and also painfully in-line with my own experience as well. participating in restorative justice activities at my daughter's school hasn't really inspired much confidence either imo, doesn't grapple with the underlying fundamental problem (really) which is that some people are just uncooperative, self-absorbed assholes. I'm sure it works in other situations where you actually have people willing to participate in good faith but let's be honest, that is not going to be the case 100% of the time.

I haven't read the book, but I think the concept is that we need to so dramatically rethink our approach to policing as to abolish the current paradigm of it, that it's an entire conceptual framework we need to stop viewing so many different social problems through. Not literally close all police depts.

End of Current Paradigm of Policing

not quite as snappy

The value of utopian desires is in how they can translate to the real world - if your goal is police abolition there are about a million points along the way to create change, from police accountability and reform to demilitarization and/or disarmament to the just and equitable society getting la-di-da-ed.

― louise ck (milo z), Thursday, October 26, 2017 10:00 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lots of really aggressive point-missing itt.

Yeah, “End patrolling” doesn’t pack quite as much of a punch. There’s gotta be a way to factor in the inspirational and/or persuasive value of the slogan settled on.

For every person willing to listen after hearing your catchy rallying cry ten others will dismiss you outright.

anyway i got into a fist fight with him a month later at the tetherball court and ended up winning and that worked much better he never bothered me afterwards.

btw not to pick on mordy but the endless repetition of this piece of folklore in every medium ever is supremely damaging to the soul (on further reflection this probably belongs in the rolling maleness thread more than it does in this thread.)

p harsh to call someone's personal experience "folklore" imo

I think high-minded goals are good because having something that's broad enough that it stays a goal is useful

I think we really fucked up by saying "slavery was abolished" in the US, because if you made a list of the things that the slave system encompassed, with ownership of other human beings being the obvious point number one, and genuine equality of people regardless of race at the other end of the spectrum, there are hundreds of things we've slowly addressed.. and many, many more that are still problems with race relations, economic class rigidity regarding the labor class, and so on.

So you need people who have the lofty goals, attainable or not, doing the intellectual and practical work to set short- and mid-term practical goals, in order to affect real long-term change.

def don't mean to suggest mordy didn't actually have this experience, but there's no question the story is a piece of popular folklore (or if you like a trope) in addition to being something that actually happens sometimes

To push my point further, nobody would have bought "ensure equal treatment and opportunities for all people" in the 1860s institutionally, but if you read a little more deeply into what the abolitionists of that era were saying, there were a handful who were saying exactly that, and who kept pushing.

it's still a lofty goal, and still one we need to strive for

yep

also yep xxp

we also should move this to a more useful thread because there are people I'd like to join in who are never going to click on a CTH thread for understandable reasons

we have an all purpose police brutality thread

Abolish the Police

def don't mean to suggest mordy didn't actually have this experience, but there's no question the story is a piece of popular folklore (or if you like a trope) in addition to being something that actually happens sometimes

Yeah, I laughed at Mordy's punchline and have no doubt that happened but as far as school goes, I'm sure restorative justice doesn't work but in my experience neither does policing by authority figures (can't be everywhere at once, too detached to "get" some of the subtler currents of bullying going on) or self-defense (bullies turn out to often be stronger than the ppl they're bullying). Childhood is hell, pretty much.

On a tangential lefty note in primary my dad was shocked that we hadn't elected a class representative to defend our interests, speak out for the students, etc. When I pitched this to the teacher she quickly turned it around into a policing role to the extent that, after we had the election, a kid told me he'd talk to the class representative to tell on some kid from another class for walking on the grass.

the whole self-defense against bullies thing would never have worked at my school because if you did try and fight back against one of the bully kids a) they usually were from abusive homes where their father had kicked the shit out of them their whole lives and had been participating in physical fights regularly since they were little kids and so were both good at fighting and tough as hell and b) if you got the better of them their buddies would jump in in and you would probably end up in the hospital (this ended up happening once)

(not to me, thankfully)

damn man that is so terrible but useful to know, even in nicer places, and

their buddies would jump in

is the fucking worst. "who the fuck are you, his bodyguard?"
xp good

Haven't listened to the bonus ep yet but listened to the Eli Valley dude on another podcast and find him a little irritating. It's funny how these figures all make the left podcast circuit the same way guests make the public radio circuit.

he's not a great podcast guest in that i didn't find him very eloquent. he explains reasonably well his distaste for the fact that american jewish community leaders are disproportionately right-wing and unfairly paint jewish people who are critical of israel as "inauthentic". but his rationale for using anti-semitic caricature didn't seem as well fleshed out for me. I'm not jewish so i don't really find it my place to be the arbiter of when a jewish person can use that kind of imagery for satirical ends tho

yeah I think it's a bit jewish inside basebally, but it's also a not particularly well expressed version of an idea I've heard put better many times, and also does, ironically, seem to be inflected with self-loathing in his case.

Alex Press was on the shorter ep of the Dig today, talked about the harrassment in several different areas, and always explicitly talked about that Vox piece:

a good rule would be: unless your article is about media specifically, you can't publish it until you interview someone who isn't on twitter

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) October 26, 2017

I'm actually pretty happy with this interview so please listen to it https://t.co/R8VcwyqueU

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) October 27, 2017

also i am officially now on the record with my opinion that if you're writing about "the left," you can't use podcasts as a hook. don't @ me

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) October 27, 2017

https://www.blubrry.com/thedig/28452149/alex-press-on-collective-action-to-fight-sexual-harassment/

i totally agree with her, at times it feels like a lot of those pieces are written exclusively for those 'extremely online' twitter lefties to read and tweet about and would read like gibberish to most normal people

alex and brandy jensen are the best dirtbags

I don’t attribute those kinda pieces as targeting the leftist twitter types so much as journalists already trapped within their online ecosystem writing to each other. The pieces all seem to treat twitter as just as central to non-media-types as they are to media types

aren't vice/buzzfeed/nymag/etc etc all kind of orbiting around that journalist ecosystem though

alex and brandy jensen are the best dirtbags

― Simon H., Friday, October 27, 2017 5:49 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They're good writers and very entertaining on twitter, but I find their frequent laments about their disastrous love lives bewildering. They're both obviously smart, attractive, funny, talented people, but to hear them tell it, they're constantly being spurned, embarrassing themselves, and suffering from unrequited feelings. I find this implausible and demand to know the real truth.

aren't vice/buzzfeed/nymag/etc etc all kind of orbiting around that journalist ecosystem though

Yeah, Brooklyn, isn’t it?

re: theri dating woes, I've always just assumed it's awful for everyone all of the time

Taibbi on those accusations:

http://exiledonline.com/about-those-exile-smears/

This is where I ask if any real people have actually accused him of impropriety or if the sole evidence is the book excerpts. (Obviously the coffee-throwing thing is...not great.)

it's solely the book excerpts afaict

No it's not. They said the same thing in interviews back then: http://observer.com/2000/06/from-russia-with-lust/

“Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them,” said Mr. Ames. “They’ll go back home with you and say, ‘No, no, no,’ and if you’re an American, you’ve been trained to respect the ‘No,’ because you’re afraid of sexual harassment or date rape, and so you fail over and over. But it took me a while to learn you really have to force Russian girls, and that’s what they want, it’s like a mock rape. And then you come back here and you’re really freaked out–because you don’t know if that actually exists deep in all women’s psyches, that that’s what they all want. All relations between guys and girls is basically violent, I think. It’s all war.”

Also, wasn't there photos in the book?

Book and interviews still from the same source tho Fred.

I do wonder if, assuming Ames/Taibbi were being honest about this shit back in the day, this will get less traction because the victims are less likely to be aware of US media trends.

It's all vile edgelord stuff if they made it up of course.

The victims were non-english speaking teenage girls, and I'm guessing Ames and Taibbi changed their names. Yeah, this won't get any traction at all.

But it's not just a satirical book, is what I'm saying. This was an elaborate persona, that they kept up when they were interviewed, and I think they supported with photos. And I guess it's theoretically possible it was all just made up, and kept on for years, and that the photos were staged. Or it's an elaboration of real bad behaviour, of drugs, booze and misogyny. And come on, it's not the first one.

Ames' defense is not about explaining what went on back then - he never talks about how they really lived in Moscow - it's an attempt to short-circuit the use of the book as evidence against him. And then to attack people who complain as either disingenuous, or just not smart enough to get it. It's bullshit.

And it's libidinal. I'm probably going to repeat this over and over, but stuff like that book is absolutely what has happened when leftist politics has gone 'libidinal' or 'dirtbag' in the past. This is another excerpt from the book:

"Of course it was absurd," writes Taibbi elsewhere in the book, "that a paper which appeared to celebrate serial murder and sexual abuse would rant righteously about things like free speech and the rule of law. But we also knew that if we didn't have those conspicuous moral deficiencies, we'd have been just another 'right thinking' left leaning alternative paper—the dog of dogs in the post-End of History, post-Clinton publishing world....With all due respect to these people, nothing scares the powers that be less than an opposition of bearded lefties and nitpicking academics."

This is the reason Chapo keeps getting drawn into these things. Because in the past, proponents of libidinal politics have been really open about how it aligns with misogyny and 'edge lord' stuff, and things that are much much worse. And the simple fact is that Chapo and co. can either draw the line and explain why this time it's different, or they will have to accept that a lot of people aren't going to trust their project at all.

Chapo aren't journalists, and most actual journalists in the dirtbag/nu-US-left sphere don't write or otherwise express themselves in anything close to a style you could describe as "libidinous."

Amber is probably the closest to being a serious journalist/writer and her style is absolutely not that.

I got bullied in Junior high once and the dude was a really good wrestler and gave me a huge black eye and I didn't say shit, and then tried to be cool with him as much as possible. I was the second person he beat up that day.

year after high school he liked a woman he met in a bar and tied her to a car transmission and sunk her in the river behind her dad's house.

so what I'm saying is the whole stand up to bullies thing can be a dangerous fallacy.

I remember one time he grabbed a kid's mullet and ripped out a handful of the party in the back portion

Huh, I guess they didn't change the names:

The club's PR man, Stan, came up to take offense at The eXile rating of the place and also to complain about a recent sample of Ames' regular eXile column Moscow Babylon, which could be described as a lonely, angry rake's progress through an urban hell of whorish indulgence and sexual, emotional and physical violence. In the column that upset Stan, Ames recounted threatening to strangle a girlfriend if she didn't have an abortion. "I know that girl," Stan chided. "You should have at least changed her name. You're too cruel for Moscow." Ames shrugged it off but later said, "He's right. I should have changed her name."

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bright-lights-red-square-19981126

Frederik B truly making himself ridiculous ITT referringto guys like Matt Christman and Will Menaker as “libidinal”.

Tbf it’s a reference to Matt’s quote that politics are inherently “libidinal” in the pulled Harvard Crimson article earlier this year.

Also the mincing of words & defense of Taibbi itt is pretty disappointing. Quality & influence of his writing has no bearing on his despicable behavior and how it should be discussed. He’s a fucking monster, sorry y’all like him, he’ll be blackballed within the week.

This is where I ask if any real people have actually accused him of impropriety or if the sole evidence is the book excerpts. (Obviously the coffee-throwing thing is...not great.)

that ames "apology" post is some real garbage

The Taibbi/Ames book is literally evil but I’m not sure there is any indication chapo would head in a similar direction. Is the idea just that any irreverent style leads to psychopathy? Seems trenchant