Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

I'm of the opinion that congress does need some members who spend a fair amount of time on a soapbox both garnering media attention and attempting to rally peers to cohesive positions, but there are a handful of legislators who do so little actual legislation work because they're busy trying to elevate their own platform in an attempt to run for higher office or get a book deal or w/e

at the bare minimum the job is to attend and vote. ideally, you actually dig into legislation and sit on some committees instead of just voting however the party draws the line. if you're actually into legislation, you reach beyond cosponsoring legislation and actually introduce some of your own

when it comes to actually getting things introduced and passed into law, boring-ass grandpas like Chuck Grassley are more effective nuts-and-bolts legislators and probably change the direction of things, for better or worse, while only getting press when a specific committee (judicial, as of late) is under the spotlight

I think in the long term McCain's biggest accomplishment was to make people think he was an important figurehead and was able to parlay that into presidential runs. which has jack shit to do with the actual work of being a senator

coming to Lincoln Center

https://www.filmlinc.org/events/chapo-trap-house-presents-starship-troopers/

I am a fierce skeptic of this film btw

i like starship troopers but it’s one of verhoeven’s emptiest films—by design of course but it keeps me from ever really forming an attachment to it. it makes sense the chapo dudes would seize on its irony i guess

it's a good movie, morbs

I saw it when it came out and basically reacted is-at-all-there-is. I liked the Casper von Dien whipping scene tho.

starship troopers is fantastic, verhoeven’s second-best hollywood movie imo and just as perceptive about america as robocop

Starship Troopers is a masterpiece, maybe the scariest film I've ever seen, far from Verhoeven's emptiest film. by showing a "successful," functional fascism, Verhoeven delivers its most vivid and horrifying indictment. Verhoeven quote that sums it up:

In a 2014 interview on The Adam Carolla Show, the actor Michael Ironside, who read the novel as a youth, said that he asked Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, "Why are you doing a right-wing fascist movie?" Verhoeven replied, "If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no one will listen to me. So I'm going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing fucking Bugs!

I'm sure I've said this elsewhere, but the commentary track w/ Verhoeven and the cast is hilarious and essential

far from Verhoeven's emptiest film

didn’t say this! it’s just like: robocop skewered reaganism while layering identity crises and great character work on top of it. starship troopers doesn’t have this bc it can’t, by design. which i think is totally fine it’s just also the reason it’s not my favorite verhoeven film

"one of his emptiest movies" I still disagree with, though I understand what you mean - like you said, by design there isn't any character to identify with. it's a POV into a nightmare future. impersonal rather than empty

This has probly been addressed on another thread, but can we separate the contribution of Verhoeven vs Ed Neumeier’s scripts?

impersonal rather than empty

yeah this is prob a better characterization (i nearly typed "coldest" instead)

I'm not even sure "impersonal" is right but I'll save it for when the next one comes out

fascism doesn’t deal in anything other than absolutes, and starship troopers is a fascist propaganda movie, so it can’t be anything other than impersonal - it does a tremendous job of showing how hollow fascist art is imo

I saw it when it came out, as a 16yo who was interested why because sci-fi, and the admittedly slow realization that I was watching satire has cemented it in my brain as "very very good."

man i wasn't even that old. i read the book and liked it because i liked the aesthetic of war and fighting bugs. i liked the movie because i saw a whole bunch of nudity. i should maybe watch it again as an adult. also LOVED the website because it had games and there were leaderboards. sounds like i don't need to read the book again tho

i first saw it when i was ten. it was my friend's birthday and we snuck in

i knew something was wrong with it but i also loved it as an action spectacle which is the effect every verhoeven movie i saw way too young had on me (i watched robocop and total recall a lot as a kid)

I didn't pick up on the satire in the least when I was 12.

I remember a review in my local paper calling it "Melrose Place in deep space," so I'm not sure they did either.

I appreciate ST so much that I ill-advisedly watched the sequels out of boredom

sorry i didnt mean to derail (blame Chapo)

looks like they finally had Contrapoints on, for real this time

I was sort of hoping they'd do a B*n Sh*p*r* reading series and have her chime in or something, but this was a fine overview of her work and cast of characters. I hope it brings her a new raft of fans.

So far this ep is good, I like that they're letting the guest speak and asking thoughtful questions and it's not just another wankfest of them yelling about how stupid everything is.

is that the contrapoints ep? i haven't listened to this in forever but if the contrapoints ep is good i'd prob listen to that one.

Yeah that one. The territory is a little well-worn (incel psychology, Jordan Peterson etc.) but I like her approach to it which I think strikes the right balance of empathy and critique.

For the exact opposite approach but getting at some of the same conclusions, the Cumtown where Nick spends most of the episode reading the Small Penis Problems subreddit is hilarious.

Natalie's approach of avoiding simple mockery is probably the only way I'd still be interested in hearing about incels. Ben Shapiro is still ripe for a more aggressive approach.

You can find some vestiges of her previous channel, Nykytyne2, still on Youtube, some of it going back 10 years. It's quite interesting how far she's come.

Her incels video is pretty incredible. It's also her first to break a million views, which is a really impressive feat for a lefty youtuber.

Nick is pretty cruel on them but gets at the same underlying point about the way that these people self-reinforce their misery to the point that they actually consider it offensive to suggest that anything could possibly ever get better for them or that anything could possibly be within their power to change.

the wonderful thing about the contrapoints video is that by linking her own experiences with self-loathing to incel's she creates empathy and understanding and reveals something true about the universal condition. not that she points out that sometimes ppl become addicted to their own misery which is easy to toss off as a pat judgement.

yeah she goes into that on the ep too, it's refreshing. If there's any possibility of "deprogramming" an incel, there has to be empathy involved.

Weirdly when she talked about the morbid curiosity that causes her to read the horrible things people write about her, I was reminded of my own tendency to go down rabbit holes watching insane antisemitic propaganda videos

someone should start a Contrapoints / lefty-youtubers thread but it shouldn't be me cause I've started too many politics threads lol

yeah that would be good, I'm enjoying this episode but also don't know anything about contrapoints or how natalie wynn is potentially problematic (sorry to reference second thoughts thread)

http://www.youtube.com/contrapoints

The top 3 videos are great, especially the incels one.

Also her 2-parter on capitalism is a great primer for anyone who wants an intro to Marxist theory but hates jargon

Alpha Males is a really funny earlier one. It's where she goes after The Golden One.

Check out her talk at the 2018 XOXO Fest, too

Oh hey, look who just got profiled in the New Yorker.

Yeah I'd be up for a LeftTube thread. Especially because I need more recommendations beyond ContraPoints and LinsdayEllis - I've heard good things abou hbomberguy but can't really bring myself to click on someone who uses formulations like "x is terrible and here's why", regardless of what the x is (well, maybe if it's capitalism).

aye, that'd definitely be good

thread of youtubers whomst are not terrible

The degree to which YouTube pushes toxic right wing bullshit on me (I'm assuming some combination of having watched the Joe Rogan podcast where Leia Remini recounted her whole Scientology experience and my demographics), but even when I reject suggestions saying they are offensive I get similar things or even other offerings by the same dude back in my suggestions

Yeah, if you watch anything remotely political their horrible shite algorithm pushes the most noxious garbage possible. I think part of the problem is also that the right-wing nonsense outnumbers the lefty stuff 100 to 1 cause it gets cranked out effortlessly and artlessly at a much higher clip.

it's almost like youtube is a horrible cesspool and their algorithm is tuned specifically, whether by accident or by design, to promote hateful content

or what simon said, i guess

i watch a lot of cooking and canning videos so i've been sunk into a rabbithole of weird christian prepper videos, i don't even mind

Two different acquaintances of mine from my grad program are now right-wing Youtubers. I watch their stuff sometimes while depressed on the internet and think, well, at least I'm not doing that.

it's a good grift!

The thing is it's not even that good a grift unless you get popular enough to have a crowdfunding following on the side, their monetization scheme has been garbage for years