Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

dylan otm re: Howard's appeal. it's a 3+ hour show, Chapo/Red Scare are all an hour plus, they go a lot of places. Howard asking Beet to spell "red" = Matt touching the poop. the interviews are often the most substantive and interesting parts of both shows. and then of course their rants, my personal favorites. the shows veer all over the place, from serious to silly to dramatic to incredibly stupid. good broadcasters can go all over the place and keep audiences listening, they don't have to be captivated the whole time. if I found HGTV hosts interesting (possible), yeah I'd tune in. but I'd rather listen to something adjacent to my interests, and to people whose opinions I'm interested in.

Having the same appeal for you doesn’t make them actually similar, though. “People chatting” is not a feature unique to shock jocks.

just had question marks appear over my head as I pondered, "are desus and mero shock jocks?"

“People chatting” is not a feature unique to shock jocks.

I mean, isn't this what Stern pioneered though? People chatting on the radio.(I'm not actually sure, but it's the first place I heard it.) I feel like his influence or my perception of it is all over these unscripted podcasts. Rush Limbaugh, say, is an extremely different vibe.

have you listened to Howard and Robin talking during the news (the last hour of the show)? it's really not that far off from Chapo

xp ryan otm, Limbaugh is more of a one man show vibe

That article is an interesting artifact of what happens when people start interpreting ideological commitments as cultural capital.

I think your views are being colored by being Stern aficionados and seeing that influence elsewhere.

Panel shows discussing the events of the day have been around throughout radio and TV history. Chapo has much more to do with the McLaughlin Group or the Firing Line crossed with the Stewart-era Daily Show than it does with 3 hour radio broadcasts.

Down to the “it’s just comedy” disavowal of political responsibility.

Will Menaker
‏@willmenaker

Are we the Leftist Howard Stern? That's not for me to say... I'll let others decide.
9:22 AM - 19 Nov 2016

Chapo has much more to do with the McLaughlin Group or the Firing Line crossed with the Stewart-era Daily Show than it does with 3 hour radio broadcasts.

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Monday, March 25, 2019 2:42 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am not even a huge stern fan but this seems like an absurd claim

"chapo trap house" + "daily show"
About 24,300 results (0.51 seconds)

"chapo trap house" + "howard stern"
About 7,470 results (0.60 seconds)

^^Yeah that's a fair point. Let me rephrase: I think Stern is an influence in some primordial way (after all I'd argue he's an influence on the Daily Show!) but I actually wish Chapo were MORE like mid 00's Stern. It often feels like they are running down bullet points and there's not as much room for spontaneity as I'd personally prefer. (The more scripted or structured a podcast feels the faster I tend to tune out....not quite sure why.)

well Google search results I guess it's proven

which one of the chapo bros should grow the howard stern hair

Matt can't.

I think whoever wants to pay for it

neither can howard
xp

By the time Chapo appeared the concept of several dudes in a room shooting the shit was a pretty well worn podcast format. Idk if we have to reach for Stern as a model.

this show has gotten back to being funnier again and the last few have been very good i think

Former ILXor on the pod tonight

him again!

Is he the first/only?

That was basically the platonic ideal of a Chapo ep

guess I gotta shell out $5, huh

reddit.com/r/blackwolffeed

I can afford $5! I just lapsed a long time back because I wasn't really listening that much.

guess that's a nice resource for the broke comrades or w/e though

The way I figure it is they make more than enough goddamn money and my 5 bones can go to Citations Needed or whatever

at least they pay Adomian for his appearances

I believe they pay all their guests.

Def one of the best eps in a while. Sometimes I run out of energy for their raging frustration at everything but here it felt very appropriate.

Also loved the Matt history tangents.

Coming in late here to mention that shock jock is different than morning zoo

Also that DSA HQ and Jacobin need to decamp the hell out of the NYC media sphere

Jacobin is mostly useless tbh (though they have good takes from time to time), Bhaskar's book seems downright embarrassing

I rarely enjoy Jacobin pieces, but I do give them credit for helping the "socialist revival" get going.

Bhaskar's book seems downright embarrassing

― Simon H., Thursday, March 28, 2019 10:56 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought this book hasn't even been released yet.

and yet

https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/026_01/20823

I threw Means TV a lil dough

Capitalism controls your entire life
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀@StreetFightWCRS pic.twitter.com/NE9bB0FAGM

— Means TV (@means_tv) March 28, 2019

This Saturday at Littlefield in Brooklyn come see street fight radio and @CHAPOTRAPHOUSE start a laugh riot. https://t.co/MNxhvKkmw6 pic.twitter.com/68MiiBRkHj

— Round Like Pizza (@StreetFightWCRS) April 1, 2019

I wish they let Matt Taibbi talk a little more

Brendan James reviews The People's republic of Walmart and ponders the planned economy

A rich tradition of heterodox economics, mathematics, and computer science has materialized to answer this problem of calculation. But it is modern processing power, dwarfing the bandwidth available in the twentieth century, that truly rebukes the argument above. Consider computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott who, in about two minutes, using only university equipment, claims to have run models that were able to optimize an economy “roughly the size of Sweden.” You get the feeling that the mammoth data centers at Amazon, Ford, or Foxconn might be capable of even more impressive calculations. And besides, to insist communist theory prove some perfect equation is either disingenuous or missing the point. The question is not whether planning is mathematically pristine, but whether it can allocate better than the market.

The answer, to return to the material world, is yes it can. It’s true that under capitalism firms plan internally but compete with each other, a dance that keeps companies innovating new ways to capture surplus and, sometimes, inadvertently benefit regular people. This dynamic would not occur naturally in a planned economy; one cannot just seize Amazon or Walmart, socialize it, and call it a day. Phillips and Rozworski apparently recognize this (there is an entire chapter in The People’s Republic of Walmart titled “Nationalization Is Not Enough”) and point to an interesting line of thought from economist J. W. Mason: Banks tend to operate as a privatized Gosplan, where the slush fund of finance capital flows to whichever firm a group of Brooks Brothers-clad planners decide deserves investment, regardless of profitability. Market competition, in other words, is hardly the divine engine of innovation if so many firms are, as Mason writes, “born new each day by the grace of those financing it.”

Even so, could planning replicate the market’s capacity to innovate? Ford’s former CEO Mark Fields certainly seemed to think so, declaring in 2016 that his company would soon “be able to use analytics to anticipate people’s needs, as opposed to people trying to tell us what they want.” And to the perennial taunt of the lizard-brained conservative—“I love seeing idiot millennials protest capitalism on their Apple-made IPHONES”—one may point out it was largely the market-immune Pentagon and Department of Energy, not Apple, that developed the batteries, algorithms, touch screens, and microprocessors our right-wing friend uses to tweet about the Muslim Caravan. Once again, none of this is to celebrate the actual decisions or practitioners of planning as it exists under capitalism, but to recognize its power and how else it might be put to use.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/stick-to-the-plan-james

read this by cosma shalizi if you are interested in central planning and computation http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/

https://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/nodeimage/public/blogs_2018/08/2018_34_control_room_obs.jpg

I always enjoyed the little detail that the Cybersyn consoles had holders for one’s whiskey glass

likely a stafford beer addition though allende was fond of scotch

Pareene was also on Trillillies (recorded in McConnell's home state)

Laughing hard at the notion that central planning and democracy can co-exist. Laughing even more that they can co-exist thanks to some algorithms that would dictate all distribution of all resources.

Laughing even harder at the ideas of pro-Marxists claiming that our governments should replicate Wal-Mart's planning methods to better market efficiency.

it’s true, marx was famously anti-automation

http://cdn-webimages.wimages.net/04f8e73a2e33f38293194faac1d4b4704d89b-wm.jpg?v=3

I'm in favor of panopticons and in favor of centralized cybernetic control of production