Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

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

yea i dont buy it

Is there anything where you're not a Chapo truther?

what

It's because he's going to be uncovered as a Russkie psyop, right?

@deep_rouge

yeah I don't buy it either, probably killed by antifa and they're trying to cover it up

what is a "Chapo truther"

i find it hard to believe someone would give up a 6 figure salary to record 2 podcasts a week to "write more" and .... "be online."

Nono, he wants to NOT be online. I totally get giving up a 6 figure salary to not be online.

ah i misread. i remember a few weeks ago they intro'd a new guest producer (Meg?), so i suppose it's not sudden.

these guys all come from pretty cushy backgrounds right? (Felix and Matt, at least.) walking away from a paycheck probably not that big a deal.

has anyone listened to Season of the Bitch yet? I had forgotten about them but then I saw DSA giving them some shine just now

We’re gonna be livestreaming @seasonoftheB’s Chicago liveshow tonight at 7PM EST! https://t.co/JCiOiXChTf

— DSA 🌹 (@DemSocialists) November 4, 2017

Saw it speculated elsewhere that maybe Brendan wanted to stay til the book was done

wtf is going on here?

Uh oh looks like Eric found out about my pep pep pic.twitter.com/WDwZH4UwTB

— Will 🍂 Menaker (@willmenaker) November 6, 2017

will menaker's paternal grandfather is alleged to have spied for the kgb. garland just found this out

My take on "Chapo truther" is that the episodes that were "eaten by the computer" were actually deliberately destroyed because they were too offensive and/or just sucked

But Brendan's departure undermines this theory. Maybe he was just fired for incompetence.

...or maybe he just decided to split for reasons he already stated? and who cares either way

so eric garland is ilx poster dan i huh

oh noooo not this 'too offensive' shit again

so eric garland is ilx poster dan i huh

OK, this is a claim I believe

oh and since this is still the de facto DSA thread for now, apparently they're fielding/supporting 25 local candidates for election, more power to em imho

oic milo got me mixed up with dan

brendan should've been fired for incompetence

fwiw I thought this week's episode sounded fine

really need a Saudi Arabia episode

didn't Felix say they were going to do another Derek Davison ep on that subject or did I mishear

yeah, he did

I'm gonna be real, I find those episodes a little tough to follow sometimes, a lot of information flying by at a very quick pace

Doesn’t help that the Saudi line of succession is more difficult to follow than the end of the Plantagenets.