Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

bhaskar?

― Simon H., Thursday, November 2, 2017 7:21 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how do u call yourself db and not be on first name basis w my boy Bhaskar Sunkara smh

there are a lot of dirtbags these days!

there's a significant logical fallacy in Savage's Russia stuff up there, I think it's the fallacy of the undistributed middle but it's been a long time since I was on deck-of-cards familiarity with those terms but anyway the leap from "look, you wouldn't need Russians to have Trump" to "concern over election-meddling is exclusively about externalizing challenges to the liberal order"...that right there is a really weird leap whose central function is hobby-horsism imo

he specifically does not use language like "exclusively" in that thread and that he "does not want to generalize"

I don't really have a sense of how many people outside of twitter really think like this but there isn't a single Dem critic of any type or level of influence that hasn't been accused of being a Ruskie psyop at this point

That's exactly the kind of preemptive defense a Ruskie psyop would make!

fuck!!!!

right, that's the logical fallacy. it doesn't follow that there aren't any Russian bad actors, though on the left we have the legacy of years & years of U.S. propagandizing against the Soviets that rightly make people go "hold up, are we hoisting the Russian Punch puppet again?" Good and healthy instinct. Kind of obviously not what's in play now, given that "Russia" does not mean "the Soviet Union" in any sense at all & isn't the same bogeyman, at all. ("I don't want to generalize" is a nice thought to follow "almost whenever," eh)

Is dril a lefty meme, or just weird?

dril is a prophet, a seer, a sage - perhaps the most important mind of the 21st century

tbh most leftists I follow will say "well, there's definitley something there" when pressed on Russia and most centrists never go anywhere near the #theresistance twitter insanity of "chapo is paid by Russia" or w/e

granted there is a lot to clown about the way a lot of centrists frame the whole thing, the whole treason/Trump as Benedict Arnold shit, trying to go all gung-ho patriotic about the matter. I don't know if that's just an attempt to troll right-wingers/get moderate right-wingers on yr side or if it's actual naivete about the US as a nation, pretty obnoxious either way. But I do think the wilder conspiracy shit is the province of a vocal minority (amplified by "look at this asshole" type safaris on the left - don't get me wrong, I lol too) and so knee-jerk dismissal of the issue before terms are set on what's actually being talked about is counter-productive

I guess for me it's about priorities. let's say for argument's sake that Russian propaganda was able to flip, idk, 2% of the vote. (a purposely extreme figure.) the response to this should be to present a genuinely inspiring vision for the future that overwhelms the effect of that influence and mobilizes the disenfranchised. outside parties can only exacerbate divides and issues that are already present to have any impact; for instance they may have exploited BLM messaging but I don't think anyone itt would argue that BLM's concerns aren't real as hell.

oh and switch to paper ballots.

since this is also the nu left thread I just wanted to add that DSA seem to be rocking it with local races and messaging

We've got one more weekend to tell voters that Jon Grant is working to put people over profit! 🌹 Join us! #GoGranthttps://t.co/vK5SxTlyWy

— Seattle DSA🌹 (@SeattleDSA) November 3, 2017

#theresistance twitter insanity of "chapo is paid by Russia" or w/e

lol ok I'm way too out of the loop for this thread I had no idea this was a thing

it even made it into this thread!

it will catch up to "The Intercept is paid by Russia" if a couple more ilxors get on board

lol totally fair Simon, the thread is 3k posts long and I'm interested in left-of-Democrats politics but not in CTH at all so I'm a total tourist in this thread

I'll admit this thread is the only time I've ever heard that nonsense floated, but there's plenty equally insane theories out there. I mean when ppl start earnestly retweeting Louise Mensch you know things are dire.

*skulks off, having probably earnestly RTd LM a time or two before getting schooled*

we all have skeletons

Joan Crawford go on Chapo

would listen tbh

speaking of which I was relieved the newest ep was recorded too late to incorporate Brazilegate

good luck usa

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/11/03/antifa-apocalypse-anarchist-groups-plan-to-overthrow-trump-regime-starts-saturday.html

Joan Crawford go on Chapo

https://media.giphy.com/media/dEvfjRZG0Fcn6/giphy.gif

just realized that I'm going to a counter-fascist demo tomorrow (aka the 4th) lmao

damn stay safe for real

I'm not worried, it's in TO and the anti-antifa hysteria really has not extended to canada (that I know of)

it did occur to me listening to the episode that they may not have taken the threat of actual serious fascist violence at one of these events (and it REALLY could based on the videos they described) seriously enough

like I'm absolutely 100% for clowning all these motherfuckers but I can't help but be reminded of Four Lions - it's all hilarious till there's a body count.

of course what he hasn't done is put any actual leftists on television lol

― Simon H., Thursday, November 2, 2017 7:13 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's had TNC on a bunch iirc

oh look, it's an opened can of worms

TNC is about as far left as people who make regular tv appearances get

like I'm absolutely 100% for clowning all these motherfuckers but I can't help but be reminded of Four Lions - it's all hilarious till there's a body count.

haven't heard the most recent one but i think they underrate how clownish the 30s were. sometime around the conventions last summer matt said you didn't need to worry about serious street violence from american fascists because rascal scooters blah blah but also for this allegedly more serious reason: because fascism is a death cult that requires the intense trauma of a ww1 and americans are just too if-you-will coddled. leaving aside the "um guns?" response here, a lot of the brownshirts were not of the war generation--hitler's generation--but of the one after it, which had grown up in a nonfunctioning peacetime economy totally immersed in war stories, in representations of heroic violence, whose inaccessibility to the 30s kids became tangled up w their other forms of frustration. these guys talked about the stab-in-the-back as much as the actual vets did. and tho proud boy types have maybe generally not personally experienced a lot of brutality they have definitely seen a lot of it, in fact obsessively aestheticized it, and also have some idea that it's what our country performs around the world w the assistance of their older brothers, hampered only by domestic stabs in the back. so as good for morale as it may be to be like lol we're gonna fuck you up nerds, important to take the times seriously. stay safe simon.

Should we have a separate thread for american left politics ? Distinguishing it from a podcast thread would be beneficial

xp Yeah that's a great point, someone mentioned the other day that "this is nothing like the Weimar Republic... we're not coming out of a devastating defeat in war..." ummmmmmmmm

if there's enough interest we should probably do a leftist political activities thread yeah

we've already established that 4 or 5 ilxors are in DSA and I would be surprised if that # didn't go up

good idea imo, bc as much as i like the show, i predict Chapo will become impotent & irrelevant just like The Daily Show did, and it won't take nearly as long.

I’ve been posting some stuff in the “Social Activism in the Trump Era,” but that one’s not really sufficient for a lefty politickin’ thread, is it

nah and it might be nice to have a spot to more specifically discuss tactics, theory, messaging, issues etc specific to working primarily outside the major parties

This is not to discredit the threat of violence - partially because I don't really buy Matt's theory in the first place, coddled people can do lots of damage - but I don't think Iraq/Afghanistan can be compared to what WWI was for Germany. WWI was a massive death toll, the horror of a totally new kind of warfare, a total clear defeat with treaties signed to the effect, and following that, a total breakdown of social and economic cohesion that easily explains why kids who didn't go through the war were equally up for Hitler's insanity. Afghanistan and Iraq were wars fought (as usual with the US) far far away, by people who were paid to fight them, with results that can be distorted into victories if you drink enough kool-aid, and while sure, the economy's in the dumper, yr average american's hardly likely to go through what Weimar-era kids did.

None of this makes me think fascism is less of a threat in the US right now, to be clear - I just think maybe the Weimar Republic has limited value as a model of "this is ALWAYS how fascism rises".

Also WWI was not just a massive, clear defeat, but one with a cataclysmic amount of shock to the German population, wasn’t it? They had been continually told things were great, and that shock/discontinuity at the end had people searching for a cause.

all true; i didn't mean to say that we were living in weimar. just specifically to say that people who have marinated in images and narratives and distorted memories of war rather than literally lived through one are a perfectly real and vintage fascist constituency -- that you can aestheticize war just fine on a screen, esp when the wars themselves are increasingly fought on one. and that yes, contra matt, the fact that ww1 didn't just happen isn't a reason to feel safe.

(i do think that there's stuff we could learn from weimar's parliamentary failure, in which both hard- and center-left parties make bad choices that look familiar 2 me. and that's a parliamentary system -- more resilient, you'd think, which i guess is why society had to half-collapse for the nazis to get 30%. under our system they more or less already have 30%.)

Main difference from what I've read is the hard left in Germany was counting on acheiving Glorious Revolution via Soviet support (the Soviets, sufficiently occupied with consolidating power in their own territory, had no such plans), so their main blunder was failing to mobilize with the centre against fascism - which is a lesson that I think could apply to, say, second round voters in France who refused to show up against Le Pen, but in the US context "more compromise towards the centre" doesn't seem like what I (or the majority itt) are clamouring for. But I'll admit I'm not sufficiently well read on this topic, would love to hear more!

people who have marinated in images and narratives and distorted memories of war rather than literally lived through one are a perfectly real and vintage fascist constituency -- that you can aestheticize war just fine on a screen, esp when the wars themselves are increasingly fought on one

Absolutley! I think modern terrorism and lone wolf shootings both attest to that. And the comedy fascist can quickly shade over into a real danger - halpless "these are good memes" comedy relief one day, shooting into the crowd the next.

I mostly agree that we shouldn’t discount the threat of incipient fascism but I took Matt’s point to be slightly more subtle: the core constituency of these movements are reasonably comfortable (if insecure) middle class suburbanites. This is not the type you see taking to the streets in large number. And frankly, it’s almost (almost!) impossible to imagine the coddled late capitalist white middle class resorting to violence in anything but their imaginations so long as they remain materially comfortable. I think the fantasy breaks down at the point they run any real offline risks.

(I’ve overlapped with some points above I somehow missed on my phone—apologies!)

Brendan is leaving the show:

personal note: After a lotta fun, I'm bowing out from Chapo. It's bittersweet cause I'm proud of the show, but i'm all podcasted-out

— The Dying Pundit (@deep_beige) November 4, 2017

Curious to see what the real story is

Fact is I never set out to be a podcast person, I stumbled into it. Its fun but tiring, and I've missed writing, not being online, etc

— The Dying Pundit (@deep_beige) November 4, 2017

But the Chapo sound desk is in good hands, it's been a nice orderly hand-off. I promise you won't notice

— The Dying Pundit (@deep_beige) November 4, 2017

So I wanna say thanks to my pals for these past two years. I'll miss working with my big stupid children. See you later

— The Dying Pundit (@deep_beige) November 4, 2017