Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

Khachiyan is very smart but gives the impression she has next to no experience of the world, outside a Brooklyn art scene she hates 99.9% of the other people in.

There was a Twitter thread from last year about how Greek culture is fundamentally antithetical to capitalism (and better for it) based on the owner of a cafe (who was probably fiddling taxes, tbh) giving her sister a discount for paying for a coffee in cash that was so mortifying i could have self-combusted. It's not a huge surprise she likes Nassim Taleb so much.

khachiyan is not very smart, but she is very good at zeroing in on a target and utterly destroying them. this is not because of any kind of brilliance or wit, but because she rejects the scruples and principles that the rest of left-twitter-world takes for granted, so she is free to really lay into someone in that slimy and ruthless way that is more common among sam hyde types. the kind of person that, if she hadnt grown up in a metropolitan-left milieu and thus felt a gut-level identification with "leftism," would definitely reject all this stuff and describe herself as some kind of "paleoconservative"

so, I guess I dont like her

oh wow she likes taleb and la paglia. head explodes

I'm going to pretend calling paglia "la paglia" was just some try-hard affectation and not a mistake based on me thinking about anthony lapaglia

never apologise for thinking about anthony la paglia imo

have the Red Scare women ever acknowledged the existence of this Pitchfork Review Reviews style twitter account/podcast?:

https://twitter.com/RedScareRoundup

Lord.

That's depressing.

That is deeply weird

Dasha has a lot of very weird / obsessive fans via the CT link.

Coverage on Infowars and John Oliver probably didn’t help

Someone rightfully called them out for pimping book sales via Amazon right now.

Doesn’t ever Author on earth sell through amazon?

Sure but it's NAGL for socialists to encourage people to cross picket lines.

crossing a picket line technically means scabbing, not buying things.

That said, did they literally do something active to promote buying the book at amazon specifically after the strike began?

Crossing a picket line means walking into a shop to buy stuff (or the digital equivalent), not just scabbing. They were promoting it on Twitter and the first link on their book site is to Amazon.

If it doesn't bother you, cool, but there's already some weirdness with the 'buy the book' stuff and Bezos is one of their top supervillains.

If Matt bought a Tesla he would be rightfully roasted.

I guess in theory they could have just removed the Amazon link from among the half dozen links for the pendency of the strike but that's reaching pretty hard for a NAGL.

A GL would be removing the Amazon link permanently. And the Apple/B&N/Google links. Actively push people to the indie bookstore link - if buyers want to find it on the big boys they can do it themselves.

NEWSFLASH they don't give a shit

*extremely virgil voice* buy the book

khachiyan is not very smart, but she is very good at zeroing in on a target and utterly destroying them. this is not because of any kind of brilliance or wit, but because she rejects the scruples and principles that the rest of left-twitter-world takes for granted, so she is free to really lay into someone in that slimy and ruthless way that is more common among sam hyde types. the kind of person that, if she hadnt grown up in a metropolitan-left milieu and thus felt a gut-level identification with "leftism," would definitely reject all this stuff and describe herself as some kind of "paleoconservative"

so, I guess I dont like her

― epigone, Monday, 16 July 2018 20:52 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is good posting

A GL would be removing the Amazon link permanently. And the Apple/B&N/Google links. Actively push people to the indie bookstore link - if buyers want to find it on the big boys they can do it themselves.

this seems fair to me

but also let's not pretend that Amazon was/is gonna take in more than, like, 100 bucks total from sales of the chapo book

lol

BONUS Episode: Twisted SESTA ft. @ConnerHabib 🏹🔥🦑🐺 https://t.co/hE6VyLnCj3

— Chapo Trap House (@CHAPOTRAPHOUSE) July 17, 2018

^^interesting stuff in there about the left's weird, divergent takes on sex work and sex workers

yea I heard someone say Bernie is "bust" because he voted for SESTA. they said "we can do better"................ you sure???

well it is god awful. corbyn supports the nordic model too. daft old men

Conner Habib wrote a rather shitty article repeatedly referring to an acquaintance of mine who works with people forced into sex work as an “anti-sex bigot.” SESTA does seem massively wrong-headed though.

Yeah, I know a couple of people who have had toxic experiences with sex work and I'm not at all eager to downplay the real risk of harms, the tricky part is disentangling what harms are "innate" to sex work and what's related specifically to sex work under present conditions. (For any lurkers who aren't going to click that link, there's a fourth mic on the ep who's a sex worker.)

Moshe Kasher also had a recent episode on Sex Workers’ Rights with USC Prof Heather Berg, Conner Habib, Guy Brannum, and Kara Klenk. They talk about both legal and extralegal work.

https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/show/houndtall/id/6805357

ahahahhahahaha

Unlike Russia, for example, America has a crumbling, third-world transportation infrastructure, a bloated, prohibitively expensive healthcare system and no paid maternity leave to speak of so I don’t want to hear another word of “treason” from the collusion truthers

— Anna Khachiyan (@annakhachiyan) July 18, 2018

they have bullet trains in moscow?

"collusion truthers"

Russia is a futuristic public infrastructure dreamland. Afaict all cars have automated GOPRO to memorialize the sundry pleasures of driving there.

Russia hacked the DNC so Trump would give us maternity leave

— Quinoa🖕Appropriator (@MattAlwaysWrong) July 18, 2018

they have bullet trains in moscow?

Yes, they do (Sapsan). You can do Moscow to St Petersburg in four hours at 290 km/h. I suspect she’s at least partly trolling though.

fwiw, I disagree with the characterisation of her as a potential paleo-conservative. Personal unpleasantness aside, her scepticism of liberal feminism, mild streak of cultural essentialism, etc, etc, are not very uncommon on the left in Europe, particularly in the FSU. She basically sounds like a lot of Russian liberals rather than an iconoclast.

Having followed from afar the illnesses and deaths of two of my in-laws in Russia over the past few years, I can attest that a health care system based around idea "fuck you. Go find somewhere to die" is probably less bloated and expensive than ours.

wow, I hadn't read her twitter feed in a long time, it's actually much shittier and less smart than I remembered

Xp, yes I don’t think anyone in good faith could support a system where surgeons earn $6000 a year and healthcare is ‘free’ only in the sense that the cash you pay them to bribe your way into treatment is not on any official books.

But again, she doesn’t seem particularly interested in how anywhere other than a small portion of the US works in practice.

a note on the book just posted on their Patreon:

Have You Considered Buying the Book?

Hi everyone,
Greetings and semper games. As you may have heard, we have a book coming out. While a lot of people have already sprung for a pre-order, we wanted to touch base with you, the subscribers who fund Chapo, seeing as we still don’t take money from advertisers like WonderWear, the antimicrobial one-piece pajamas with the special moisture wicking ass-flap, or MealMe, the company that will send you all the ingredients for a healthy meal and a disposable chef to cook it for you.

We are genuinely excited about the book. Its rallying cry is that weak willed, compromise-humping liberalism cannot resist fascism, i.e. the current collection of brain-melted psychopaths we call the Republican Party. It’s an unrelenting indictment of the so-called #Resistance, the Democrats, and (for all you tankies out there) the social-democratic half measure of American progressivism. The book is, if you like, a prequel to the show — it lays out the backstory of the people, events, and history that have led us to this particular Verhoeven-esque moment in American history. It is Chapo: Origins. Above all, we really had fun writing it, and we truly hope you will have the same experience reading it.

For us, selling our book is not about money. Sure, if sales go astronomical, it’s possible the publisher and the show will make something back. But far more important to us is the pure spectacle the book will ignite if we manage to get in that Bestseller VIP Section, easily done if each one of you pre-ordered a copy before Aug 21. You know what that would mean....

It would mean we could force the smug gatekeepers of conventional wisdom to take socialism seriously; it would mean we could force the worst people in the world to read us owning them — and have them write about it. It would mean we could knock fucking Hillbilly Elegy or 12 Rules for Dating My Wife off the list. It would mean we could reach people like your lib parent who still has faith in Chuck Schumer, or your apolitical coworker who doesn’t yet hate his boss enough.

Imagine David Brooks having to engage with NoFap as political praxis. Imagine Ezra Klein and Matty Yglesias having to Voxplain their long-forgotten support for the Iraq War. Imagine the National Review having to prove that William F. Buckley didn’t officially die in 1977, only to continue to his abominable "un-life" jacking off in coffins and haunting America for thirty more years of op-eds.

Perhaps more than anything, imagine sending a message — through your favorite large failchildren— to the lib, centrist, establishment pundit class: Get out of the way. We’re done with you. You say say we can’t violate the norms, or have socialized healthcare and a planned economy? We say fuck off. We want socialism, the return of the vastly-underrated TV show Becker, and the abolition of ICE. And we’ll do it ourselves if we have to.

This is what we want from the book release. If you want it too, please join us in the greatest Duck Hunt yet. Buy the book (and preferably not from Jeff Bezor at Amazon).

H.A.G.S.,

Chapo

the return of the vastly-underrated TV show Becker,

Virgil wrote this bit, I bet $1000

#libtears

I think the world would be a slightly better place if they had never written the book

one for the book jacket

Virgil wrote this bit, I bet $1000

I think the world would be a slightly better place if they had never written the book

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive)

I'm looking forward to it now! I like that it'll give more background on the hosts.

I don't think you're gonna get that - I'm expecting more Christman-style US historical context, not personal biography.

‘We’re not doing this to make money’ - oh fuck off

You don't believe they did it to make Chuck Schumer cry?