Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

I also favor Bandcamp as my preferred online vendor.

The Yiannopolous example is a good one, though, because his life was destroyed (which is awesome and funny) but it hasn’t done anything to stem the tide of fascism. His deplatforming didn’t actually matter in the end...

― papal hotwife (milo z), Wednesday, February 2, 2022 7:54 PM (yesterday)

Well this conveniently discounts a whole host of independent variables (eg well-funded campaigns of disinformation, a pandemic). Not to get too personal but is this sort of circular logic a standard pattern with milo z?

Just to be clear Mr. Z, my questions about social democracy and regulation of toxic industries was directed specifically at you. Pretty clear that shit has sailed tho.

Er, the SHIP has sailed.

I'm really confused, you guys are in favor of deplatforming someone?

― JacobSanders, Thursday, February 3, 2022 1:01 AM (seventeen hours ago)

I sure as hell am. Should we just let Alex Jones spread toxic propaganda on YouTube unchecked? What planet is this guy from.

I also keep forgetting we're democratic socialists and not social democrats.

*purges self*

Well this conveniently discounts a whole host of independent variables (eg well-funded campaigns of disinformation, a pandemic). Not to get too personal but is this sort of circular logic a standard pattern with milo z?

What does the pandemic have to do with Yianoppolous, who was deplatformed in 2018 and whose deplatforming didn't matter at all in the end? The ruin of his life, or Richard Spencer's life, or theoretically Joe Rogan's life is immensely satisfying but it doesn't appear to actually be useful politically. In part because the people with money and a vested interest in reactionary ideology aren't deplatformed and can't be, unless Mr. Choppy comes out and we start executing right-wing billionaires.

Just to be clear Mr. Z, my questions about social democracy and regulation of toxic industries was directed specifically at you. Pretty clear that shit has sailed tho.

Consumer boycotts are not "regulation of toxic industries," though. Neil Young didn't ask for Spotify to be expropriated and turned into a public utility.

"Stricter policies in general" are very much a double-edged sword for the left - because the right-wing billionaires own the media in question, they come for us first using those rules, as anyone who has been put in Facebook or Twitter jail for joking about guillotining CEOs can attest (or as Mother Jones has written about re: their traffic numbers from Facebook). It's kinda like how enhanced domestic terrorism laws post 1/6 would just get used against environmentalists and Muslims and left-wing activists of all stripes.

Yeah I have no issue with Alex Jones saying whatever he says, I've listened to what he has to say and it doesn't interest me. I understand what's wrong with his views, because I was allowed to hear his views, I made a judgement. If others agree with him then that's on them, I remember hearing Alex Jones when I moved to Austin in 1995, I remember him screaming with a megaphone about George Bush and the Iraq War in front of UT. He seemed like a sweaty chain smoking lunatic. If someone wants to discredit him that's easy. He has years of being online. I struggle to understand the cynical view that the public needs to be protected from dumb people whoever they are.

Would this be the Alex Jones who is still mired in court appeals after being found liable for perpetuating a hoax that further ruined the lives of people who lost their children in a school shooting

yeah that's the cost of free speech, if you lie the courts will punish you. Using Alex Jones as an example of free speech is almost perfect, it's free but it's accountable.

I'm somewhat skeptical about the efficacy of consumer boycotts and calls for accountability, but there are a handful of terrible fringe media outlets that basically just run ads for shitty pillows, reverse mortgages, and spurious companies that can "help you with your medicare" because no advertiser wants to get near them

I get "ooh the nanny state" vibes from the idea others need protection from dumb people, but when the platforms we're talking about are just poorly-moderated ad traffic venue companies like YouTube, twitter, and facebook, and the type of content starts to fall from passive income (ad revenue) to active engagement (being a producer by paying up front), I fail to see how telling them you're going to walk if they don't drop a bad actor is any different from someone crankily writing to their newspaper several decades ago to say you're cancelling your subscription if they don't stop running a column.

xp and that's exactly one guy who may be held legally accountable out of...

It's less "protect people from this dumb guy" and "why would I subscribe to your service or publish my music on it when you gave this asshole millions of dollars?"

yeah it's like everyone wants to talk about deplatforming but no one wants to talk about how the platforming happened. such a libertarian guy type of argument. alex jones in 1995 was not nearly as dangerous, but why is that. and the ability of *some* people to sue him in the most egregious situation is not an example of free speech coming with accountability. they had to suffer real harm before they were even able to sue (because you really can't sue someone just for lying), and it's not something that's accessible to everyone.

I mean, in the late 90s when I was in high school, listening to that type of stuff was mostly a goof, and anyone who took the conspiracies seriously were, for the most part, standing on street corners with incoherent scrawls about lizard people and not sending bomb threats to parents

meanwhile in 2022

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyuhYHrUsAA5elO.jpg

US free speech is wild. the magazines you get in the grocery store that are like "Bill Clinton's cancer hell" with photoshopped pictures of slick willie looking even more like a vile revenant than he actually is. you'd be sued to bankruptcy for such publications in the UK.

otoh if we take all misinformation about health down from the apps then half of the accounts would disappear even if we ignore covid

the weird gossip ones made more sense when you had the Weekly World News and Batboy on the cover shelves right next to them

Christman is both on fire and probably horrifyingly correct about the metaverse in 603

Ukraine ep was disappointing albeit unfortunately recorded prior to actual invasion. Choosing a buffoonish commentator to dunk on felt like a pretty weak choice in this circumstance.

Didn't make it through either This Is Sus episode but lol @ Felix being an Old 97's/Bloodshot head

pic.twitter.com/iNCr8lhSYO

— masc4masc’s sake (@bachlover1958) February 28, 2022

she knows she's on camera

good to know felix & company found the gossip girl reboot as mystifying and bland as i did

They sound incoherent on Ukraine

Seems like a combination of being put on the defensive plus genuinely not having anything useful to say, so they default to dunking on Brookings. Which is as deserving of being dunked on as ever, but they don’t seem to have any other point.

most people speaking about ukraine right now don’t have a point, though. I hear we have an entire thread

their point about Ukraine is that the USA has a CIA, which is their point about all foreign policy topics

I was annoyed that Matt was able to just say "The US put Putin in power!" as a one-off line as though it was accepted left fact, that seemed like such an absurd oversimplification at best.

Putin is a deep CIA sleeper--probably doesn't even know it himself

What is the left argument for that - is it because we supported Yeltsin and Yeltsin helped bring Putin to power?

(for he US having "put him in power" obv, not for him being a deep CIA sleeper)

I'm no expert but: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-10-04/yeltsin-shelled-russian-parliament-25-years-ago-us-praised-superb-handling

Xp

Yes, essentially. The line would be that Putin was Yeltsin’s preferred successor and Yeltsin was in power at the time because of the extraordinary effort, on the part of the US, to help him win the previous election. The other element is that the US eased its position on an election being necessary for any successor to be considered valid.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2020-11-02/putin-clinton-transitions

The liberal interventionist framing of American imperialism as fundamentally good-hearted vs. the savagery of anyone else seems like a salient topic for a leftist podcast IMO.

you mean because it's easy and avoids the issues presented by Russia's invasion of Ukraine?

Were you hoping they'd roast the Russian equivalent of Meghan McCardle or something?

not everyone can have the nuance of a Tom Friedman or the solomonic acumen of a Tony Blinken

I don't know what 'tough issues' are supposed to be dealt with from a leftist perspective - we should be a little more open-minded about American imperialism because a stronger strongman could have kept Russia in check?

Being anti-war as a non-Russian is great, we all are - but also entirely irrelevant, because we have even less power over Putin than we do over Biden (and that power has had zero ability to curb the American war machine so I have my doubts about it working on a different hemisphere). As Americans what we do get to oppose is the foreign policy establishment's war fever, the demonization of regular people in Russia, the inevitable further bump in our defense budget at the expense of domestic priorities, etc..

ukraine doesn't want to be a proxy state of russia, though. the baltic states as well as other former bloc states like poland jumped at the opportunity to join nato because they wanted to create a future for themselves that was independent of russian hegemony. nato expansion was not something the US forced on anyone. russia objects to it because they believe they have some kind of natural right to dominate this part of the world.

these factors are irrelevant to a realist like mearsheimer because he only cares about the balance of power among the "great states." but i don't know why they should be irrelevant to leftists.

furthermore, from all of this, it doesn't follow that the US should invade ukraine. this is not something i support. it just means that there are other issues at stake in this conflict than American culpability.

i honestly don't know what the chapos were really advocating in that episode. neocons and liberal interventionists like shadi hamid and other brookings fellows have wrought havoc on the world, and i guess one can read between the lines of their calls for american "leadership" and see the danger of more military intervention. but past that -- from a leftist perspective, how can smaller states be protected from foreign aggression? what would a cooperative global order look like? how can one resist american imperialism without supporting the imperial ambitions of other states?

and is it even ethical to support an insurgency that has no real chance of ousting the occupiers? doesn't that just prolong the conflict? as american citizens, what should we be demanding? there are real questions here and the chapo guys just sort of clown on newspaper columnists.

We're not Ukrainians, right? What role are 'we' supposed to play here and how? Okay, Ukraine doesn't want to be a proxy state of Russia, how are American leftists supposed to play a role in enabling that desire? Support arms shipments? What is the right way to concern oneself with this?

how can one resist american imperialism without supporting the imperial ambitions of other states?

Step one should be accepting that other states have ambitions (imperial or not...) and that we (whether 'we' means leftists, Americans, the US/EU axis, NATO, etc.) don't get to stop them. The base problem with complaints about, say, DSA's response to this or 'leftists' in general or whatever is that there's a tacit demand of picking a side. Opposing NATO expansion isn't "supporting Russia's imperial ambitions" it's trying to bring about a world that isn't a constant dick-measuring contest between reactionary nuclear superpowers.

because they believe they have some kind of natural right to dominate this part of the world

do you think your fucking country have been any fucking better in latin america since aiding and abetting the first fascist coup in brazil in '37 and on on and on and on blah blah blah CIA sponsored death squads.. chile ..nicaragua .. oh fuck it I can't be arsed. You are completely full of shit, pal.

no i don't

It seems like the conclusion is that the most moral stance is not to have any power. As long as we don’t affect anything we can’t do wrong.

Who's "we"? The United States? Yes, the planet would be better off with the US having less power and generally not 'doing things.'

"who's we?" is a good question. what we need is a better internationalism -- one that is able to address global issues such as climate change. US hegemony is a barrier to this, but so would be different countries duking it out for regional power the way they were in the beginning of the 20th century.

can't believe you didn't find any answers to the weighty foreign policy questions of the day on the podcast chapo trap house

they should at least try to address this stuff.

Seemed like an entire episode addressing this stuff, though. Just no good answers about 'what is to be done' and you know, sometimes there are no good answers to that question. 'Regional powers duking it out' is a reality, what the last month has laid bare is that there isn't a mechanism to halt that - but the global hegemon trying desperately to maintain its place can wreak a lot of bonus havoc trying and failing to do so.

personally I wouldn't be interested in their answers, but that's just me...maybe try this pod instead?

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-prestige/id1574741668