Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

when i used twitter i was sometimes informed of shitty things said or done by people or orgs i'd retweeted or interacted with. i was not cancelled for having done that and i was grateful for the information

I see this happen too but sometimes I look into the situation and the sort of person who feels compelled to say “hey this person/org you’re interacting with did this shitty thing” isn’t always the most unbiased and accurate source of information. And there has to be a point at which an infraction is minor enough that you can view it as being outweighed by the things you were following the person/org for in the first place, right? Might be different for different people?

she is a well known leftish figure whose stance on reproductive autonomy is well known that's enough

this is not primarily about her though it's about who the left is for and how certain types of people are consistently seen as more disposable than others by its gatekeepers

xp how long is a piece of string

But Greenwald, Dore, BJG, general Strasserite class reductionism. But none of this is an entryism of any kind, its more of a nihilst exitism (from broad progressivism)

who the left is for

well you're certainly ruling out like half the people on earth

(and please note anvil I’m definitely not directing that at *you*; just my little mini diatribe about political standom in general)

so much of this is about trust and inference and tone and implicature and deniability and pattern recognition at a certain point the denial of what is really being said is just a way to condone it and reiterate it and marginalise those who recognise and oppose it xps

It's cool that you don't like Liz, but calling people rape apologists for defending her is bad form, mate

this isn't (just) about liz or matt or chapo it's about chomsky and zizek and parenti and corbyn and melenchon and assange and people you know of and people you don't, every fucking leader and celebrity who is elevated to stand in for a whole movement at the expense of those who are then framed as the movement's enemies for being on the wrong side of the lines that have been drawn

it's very familiar power dynamic and the accompanying rhetoric is also very familiar and it needs to stop

yeah but you're also equating someone's religious belief with someone's rapes which is weirdly fucked up

no i am describing a dynamic which is used to defend things up to and including rape

i think saying "this doesn't seem like that big a deal and shouldn't exclude them from the movement" is completely reasonable to say about certain deviations from orthodoxy even if it would be indefensible to say about rape.

People disagree with me and it needs to stop

chomsky and zizek and parenti and corbyn and melenchon and assange
Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom

Thoughtcrime is the essential crime that contains all others in itself. Very hateful of all of you not to recognize this.

this is why i keep coming back to russell brand without apparently making my point clear- because his brief moment as a lefty hero and the famous attack on his critics* by a sainted great man of the left and the breaking of the SWP rape scandals and the hero worship of assange** did not just happen around the same time by chance and recognising this illuminates a lot of what is happening worldwide in these circles and how it's all connected. now i could be accused of conflating this or that person with a rapist in this case for describing a climate and the efforts (by those with a lot of power relative to their critics, which always seems to be ignored) to marginalise those who posed a threat to it. (*still used to defend abuses of power at all levels within the left, what a legacy) (**at least some people are ashamed of this now but far too many aren't)

this probably all seems obscure to people who don't know any of this but those who know some of it can find the other pieces relatively easily if they want

so basically no one should defend anyone on the left who is attacked by other leftists because doing so puts you in the same camp as people in the past who have defended people on the left who were attacked by other leftists

let me just ask these things: what power do i have to cancel [any of these people]? what power do i have to exclude them from the left (whatever that is, whatever that means)? what power do they have?

I don't know--maybe none. But it sure doesn't stop you from saying "Fuck you" to everyone who mentions someone you don't like

Maybe you’d be happier in the world I inhabit where Russell Brand discourse has not been of vast importance lately.

Jimmy Dore has almost a million subscribers so there's more than a dozen! I feel their effect isn't insignificant, this is part of the nihilism thats designed to turn people away from AOC because she didn't do M4A yet

I would also suggest that there’s a danger in conflating viewership with a political base, and I think that’s going to keep being a problem as more and more leftist-targeting media forms without a great left political project overshadowing.

As Pascal Robert of the excellent “This is Revolution” show/pod argues, we don’t really have a “Left” right now so much as a various atomized leftists and leftist groups.

But there are contrary incentives between being building an audience vs building a political operation, because shit you’ll pull to goose your viewer numbers will counteract the slow trust-building that political organizing requires.

I was gonna say, even Mark Fisher discourse is pretty limited IME, much less Mark Fisher’s defense of Russell Brand… 10 years ago?

i think it's interesting that you are in favor of a cancel culture with no breaks.

like, most people will say that critics have exaggerated the extent of cancel culture, that it's not really conflating different kinds of transgressions in such a reckless way, or that people can find their way back after "cancellation."

but you really support it. the real thing. cancel culture not as it actually exists, but as the criticis say it does. the nightmare come to life. everyone needing to watch their back, all the time. sympathy extended to no one. no difference tolerated.

Mark Fisher has been dead for years and you still drag him out as a bloody example of the dangers of being too lenient or understanding of the wrong people. It’s grotesque.

it's still referred to explicitly in the way i described fairly regularly. his is just one of the most famous and popular english language takes on a convenient line and it arrived at an opportune time for many, the interests represented by it are still going strong relative to others within the UK left and beyond

re: his fucking essay is still being used as a weapon. go on blame me for his death like others have. this man knew what he was doing. is everyone deliberately ignoring the SWP thing or what

my support for cancel culture is semi-facetious because it's a bullshit concept used to obscure how power works

is everyone deliberately ignoring the SWP thing or what

I'll admit I'm not sure what this refers to

The Socialist Worker Party? Are we back to Trots?

he's referring to the uk swp whose central committee covered up a rape of a young party member by a central committee member. i assume in relation to comrade crumblin's association with them?

i have to say i thought they were bad in the early 00s when their front organization "stop the war coalition" courted sunni islamists, so i win this round

thanks and ugh

earlier I tried to write in response to treeship's post with something about how the 'protection culture' that Left is railing against is far more of a living nightmare than a purely hypothetical cancel culture. But there does seem to be some eliding of the difference between protecting rapists from approbation or accountability and defending people from accusations of ideological impurity

Given that this thread is about a US podcast (theoretically) and 90% of regular posters are American, not sure you can say anyone was pointedly ignoring the goings on with a UK Trot party.

around the time one of the scandals was breaking about a decade ago a lot of prominent men on the left outside the party took strong albeit carefully coded anti-feminist positions over a seemingly unrelated issue. people will deny this but the message was loud and clear. one of these men, whose words are still used for their intended purpose including in the US, later died by suicide which is used to shame anyone who brings this up now. but many people walked away from the organised left at this time over this and they remember what it was about and they recognise when similar things are happening here or elsewhere

Left, do you think that a leftist movement that policed itself to your own ideological and moral standards would be popular, or effective, or able to win over people unsure about getting involved in politics? (And I don’t think “don’t protect rapists in the movement” is a standard held by you alone, fwiw.)

no

Ok! Do you take strategies for building power and effecting change into account at all in your political views?

i don't know those are loaded phrases

i am for the margins and the lumpen more than anything, i don't want to focus group my propaganda to appeal to ordinary people or whatever. i mainly want to keep certain things and people alive that are not aligned with the current order or necessarily with the movements that seek to replace it. there is other stuff but it sounds utopian and i have no strategy for it

I can respect that, it just seems that to have that viewpoint and also have this focus on political/cultural figures and their perceived failings is a recipe for endless anger and misery, since everyone with some kind of political power is making compromises at some level. I can’t imagine there’s anyone you could follow who wouldn’t let you down. Not to tell you what to do but your attitude seems more suited towards working on local mutual aid than, idk, letting Russell Brand take up space in your brain.

I was having such a good time not thinking about russell brand for such a long time why is he here again

haha no kidding

i have seen so many people thrown under the bus in the name of coalition building. as well as previous examples so many (most?) leftists on this shithole island seem to think we need to let refugees drown or use police/army against rioters or lock people up in cages, as necessary evils to win people (but not *those* people) over to our side. i hear stuff about gender and sexual deviance being an indulgence we can't afford if we want to win. that we can't even acknowledge colonialism because it will just alienate people or make them feel guilty. this is often coming from the radical anti-electoral left too. i know this shit happens in france and germany and the US and other places

The Wikipedia articles on Russell Brand’s controversies in very unilluminating on what people are talking about here

Does it have anything to do with Katy Perry?

xxp what i would ask about about the necessary compromises here is: which groups of people do we need to sacrifice?

there is probably a roundabout way to bring katy perry into this but there are limits

i hear stuff about gender and sexual deviance being an indulgence we can't afford if we want to win. that we can't even acknowledge colonialism because it will just alienate people or make them feel guilty. this is often coming from the radical anti-electoral left too. i know this shit happens in france and germany and the US and other places

You might hear all kind of things all kinds of places. There is not a large section of "the left" (such as it is) who don't want to acknowledge colonialism in the US. There are some assholes on Twitter.

xp you’re Left and you’re right

re: mutual aid. it's the only thing. i wouldn't have to think about this other shit at all except that i actually tried to engage with the establishment left and i had to learn about all this shit to make sense of why it wasn't working for me