Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

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

if the US left is better at this irl then i am glad. all i know is what i see online

We don’t have an establishment left here afaict

get him to the greek

I need to study up on my podcasts I guess

left pretty much totally otm despite their abrasive manner

bruenig has posted more extensively about being anti-abortion in the past, she's just smart enough to have realised now that her position on it is extremely niche and makes her no friends at all on either the left or the right, so she now much prefers to be quiet about it rather than actively courting controversy with it. https://bypass.theweek.com/articles/447812/why-im-prolife-liberal here is an article of hers from 2014, before she had the platform she does now.

she's typically pretty evasive on queer issues but with her general commitment to catholic social values and https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-there-a-christian-way-to-be-gay/ this book review which largely endorses the author's approach (the way to be a good gay catholic is to be celibate), i am very much with those who are not very fond of her. she's not very vocal about her catholic social values these days beyond all the pro-family stuff and the occasional twitter beef that she starts by criticising people (often queer) who make criticism of the family structure etc. but that's why when she does write her pro-family stuff like that latest article it annoys a lot of her critics (personally i don't really care that much about that part of it but the twitter fights she starts are terrible)

idk if she's ever been explicitly transphobic but accusing berlatsky of pedophilia in the exchange posted earlier was just terrible and she didn't apologise for it. while it's true that singal deliberately took the screenshot out of context to make berlatsky seem more ridiculous and remove the context of singal's transphobia etc., just bruenig being friendly with singal is red flag enough for 'sympathetic to transphobia' on top of the 'strong believer in catholic social values' thing honestly.

re: 'what does post-left mean on twitter' it's just the red scare/aimee terese/stupidpol axis of "the left needs to be more bigoted in general to appeal to the working class"/social conservatism justified with terrible applications of marxist theory. some of it's just a transparent grift of course but there's a lot of idiots who seem to believe this shit for real. obviously has nothing to do with the previous nihilist etc. meaning that left (poster) brought up, i think someone (aimee?) just started using it and it caught on to describe that position.

"accusing berlatsky of pedophilia" is laying it on a bit thick tbh. she posted a snarky tweet not a police report

i'm sorry but I've seen all this evidence before and it leaves you with the impression she's a social conservative who pretty much never publicly endorses social conservatism except if you read into her petty twitter beefs or whatever.

if there was even the slightest hint of actual problematic shit in what she's published since actually gaining an audience I would change my tune in a heartbeat I do not actually care to defend tradcaths believe it or not

if writing for that nazi buchanan/taki rag (something i didn't know about) doesn't make it clear enough then nothing will

Nobody denied that Bruenig had Catholic social values. The question is, so what? Left said that having idiosyncratic personal views that one doesn’t advocate for publicly is analogous to being an abuser, and people “defending” such people are using the same rhetorical moves as people who defend abusers. He is just taking it as a given that his own position is maximally virtuous and anything that departs from it is hateful and must be stamped out. As if only moderates and centrists have covered for bad people in the past and the far-left has a clean track record! This self righteous attitude is endemic in the on the left, with disagreement regularly being conflated with harm.

I would consider it harmful and not merely a difference of opinion if she was out there using her incredibly massive platform to say "abortion is bad" tbf

Even here, you are calling the American Conservative a Nazi publication rather than a paleoconservative one. What is the point of that? And now that I point it out I will be seen as “defending” the bad people rather than just trying to push back against out of control rhetoric.

Xp

You don’t need to support something or even have sympathy for it to bristle against this kind of overheated, inaccurate type of speech.

Like, there are individuals I don’t like, people who bullied me in school, bosses who were disrespectful of my time and contribution etc. But if someone came on here and started misrepresenting any of these people I would object to that too. People can be jerks and not genocidal rapists or whatever.

since when was pat buchanan not a nazi or paleowhatever not a euphemism for fascism. never mind forget it

it's a reactionary magazine for sure. i would not write for it personally.

lmao she wrote for the american conservative, that's hilarious

I’m not quite following this “we shouldn’t hold
individuals up as archetypes representing issues and political movements” point you’re making, Left, when the other point seems to be “we need to throw this person out with the dishwater because they have a bad stance on one issue they no longer speak about publicly”

in my experience, most people reading articles that are forwarded to them, unless they’re linked to a book or a series, barely notice who wrote a piece let alone research the writer’s last decade

"accusing berlatsky of pedophilia" is laying it on a bit thick tbh. she posted a snarky tweet not a police report

insinuating he was a pedophile then. it was wildly inappropriate of her to just throw around something like that, come on lol. i would dislike her just for being pals with singal (which is more than just that one tweet) even without any of the other reasons really.

she's a social conservative who pretty much never publicly endorses social conservatism

she has publicly endorsed 'abortion is bad' plenty of times. while her position is less terrible than the evangelical one of criminalising abortion it's still not good and she used to talk about it on twitter and in her writing much more. as i said, she's been smart enough to quiet down about that more recently to avoid controversy, but it was a deliberate move she only made after her views apparently caused too much dsa/twitter drama sometime in 2018. like yes her soc-dem opinion columns these days are generally fine enough but it's certainly frustrating that such a prominent voice of the left in the media these days still has views wildly out of step on a number of important issues.

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2016/10/28/pro-life-millennial-women-speak-out here's her appearing in a pro-life propaganda video by a catholic publication
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/pro-life-anti-poverty/ here's another of her early pieces (again for the american conservative lol)

Does she also think we fought on the wrong side of WW2?

lmao she wrote for the american conservative, that's hilarious

one thing which this entire conversation is ignoring is the possibility that people can in fact change. would EB still write for The American Conservative now? what if she was antagonistic to certain progressive principles before but has relaxed her views? should it not be seen as a triumph if a former conservative turns Good; should we not celebrate the prodigal returned?

not saying she HAS changed, more gesturing to the possibility of it and therefore the potentially uncharitable nature of 'check the history', as though a person is a fully carved block as soon as they establish themselves in the public eye