Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

yeah, i saw the end of one of her videos once because my gf was watching it (i think her introduction to contrapoints was her appearing on chapo)

YT culture flies over my head but her stuff is quality.

all podcasts are bad. theres no good podcasts

Can't tell if that's a challop or its opposite.

truth hurts

Podcasts and YouTube shows suffer equally from being too damn long. 45 minute limit on podcasts, 15 minute limit on YouTube, this I promise to enact if you elect me President.

(i don't use youtube for anything other than listening to music - and that infrequently - and know nothing about youtubers)

This is fair enough, I'm the other way round, use youtube for most things inc music, and Soundcloud purely for music

But PoliticalYouTube is big! Granted the reactionaries got a head start in realizing thats where the reach is, but LeftTube has big numbers too now, whether its Kyle, ContraPoints, or whoever. Ive only come across the Chapo people because of Felix being on Michael Brooks show

youtube is better than podcasts and old millennials are mad about it

I mean, they're both 99.9% trash

as is Chapo tbf :p

podcasts > youtube because you actually have to sit down and watch YouTubes, which cuts into switch time

tho I do appreciate accounts like Contra's that actually do something artistic with that instead of just someone standing in front of a camera for 30 min or, like, a still drawing of a skull

You don't have to sit down and watch YouTubes at all! Theres no rule that says thats how you have to do it!

I liked their Marianne Williamson interview so I tried listening to another so but had to turn it off after 5 minutes. Seems like a lot of strawmanning and armchair everything.

podcasts > youtube because you actually have to sit down and watch YouTubes, which cuts into switch time and Contra aside, you really don't want to look at most of these people for an extended period of time

You don't have to sit down and watch YouTubes at all! Theres no rule that says thats how you have to do it!

This is true but if you don't you are then in fact listening to a podcast.

Which means the downside of it being YouTube then vanishes?

I have youtube on pretty often for all kinds of things, but I often tend not to be actually looking, especially if its music or any kind of talk stuff. Youtube is the biggest and most accessible platform, but really I suppose its just personal preference

Podcasts are for driving jogging etc. I think you need some paid YouTube account to do that.

I’m sure I would stop listening to 90 of the podcasts I do if I had to look at the people talking

theres a download button built in to some browsers, or you can use youtube-dl (works for downloading from soundcloud too)

Which means the downside of it being YouTube then vanishes?

Sure, I mean you can also listen to most podcasts on YouTube anyway. All I'm saying really is I tend to prefer audio content, whether it's hosted on libsyn or youtube shouldn't really matter.

you can also listen to most podcasts on YouTube anyway

citation needed

Matt is on the latest Age of Napoleon. It's good if yer into Matt in history mode.

Thread: Whatever position you take on Luxemburg vs. Bernstein or Lenin vs. Trotsky or even UBI vs. a Jobs Guarantee, those debates were all at least *about* something.

— Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) July 7, 2019

A lot of the most bitter, angry socialist-on-socialist feuds in America in 2019 mostly seem to be about everyone interpreting each other's hot takery and rhetorical flourishes in the most crazily uncharitable possible ways filtered through their tangled interpersonal histories.

— Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) July 7, 2019

I guess what I'm saying is we need to build the kind of left that can at least fight about more interesting things.

— Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) July 7, 2019

i’m fascinated by the anti-UBI left

Alaska destroying state institutions to better find direct cash transfers is the future UBI people want. Every political fight after UBI would be the right marshalling popular support for increased cash held-in-person and decreased capital held-in-common.

— Blood Music (@IlllllllllllllI) July 6, 2019

I find it bizarre how hard the UBI "left" work to ignore this. Any UBI paid out below subsistence returns *immediately* to capital. What would you do with an extra 3 grand? Pay off debt and buy products. It's money laundering for a massive privatization of state property.

— Blood Music (@IlllllllllllllI) July 6, 2019

Isn't most of the left anti-UBI?

Isn't it conventional wisdom UBI is the ultimate libertarian scheme?

if tech industry dickholes like something it's probably bad is how I break it down to an extent

historically speaking, unconditionally giving everyone means of material security has been a core tenet of the left since the beginning

maybe because some tech guys got into it that will now change. But it would be a big twist and so far seems mostly confined to twitter

xpost also a core tenet of free market purists/chicago school jackasses afaic

maybe it’s the wrong thread for it but what is the ilx chapo bro consensus on like, welfare/transfers?

in the US aside from foodstamps it’s basically impossible to get transfers if you are not employed. (and trump is trying to add work requirements to SNAP). this is very different from the way it works in Canada and Europe. i think it’s desirable for those transfers to not be conditional on work, since often the most vulnerable populations can’t work (for a living wage, or at all). suspect most of you agree? once you agree to give people who don’t work money, UBI is the extreme argument that they shouldn’t depend on income, either. i think not depending on income makes sense at least to a point; if you’re making 20k per year UBI and decide to work part time but they take away your UBI you’ll just end up back at 20k. so maybe we don’t go all the way to the extreme of UBI, maybe you keep your 20k and your UBI and then it gets clawed back by progressive taxes.

i think there’s a strong political impetus to remove conditions on income support in the US, and kinda hoped the left would be the ones to do it. but maybe not?

Yeah maybe it’s another thread but generally speaking I have no problem with basic income given to citizens in need of an extra lift, regardless of employment status. I just don’t understand why it must be ~universal. Dunno why we would give free handouts at a whole lot of comfortable households with say private health insurance and a solid mortgage.

i’m fascinated by the anti-UBI left

historically speaking, unconditionally giving everyone means of material security has been a core tenet of the left since the beginning

― flopson,

Yes, but I think theres maybe a growing realization that UBI isn't that - if it was, why not do Universal Basic Services instead?

Andrew Yang gave the game away, unwittingly, when he let slip on Rubin(!) that once UBI was in place, you could start to cut welfare, because you would give people the choice. I'm not anti-Yang per se, but this is a huge problem, and in his core policy. Trojan horse laid bare (and thats before you get into whether its inflationary or not)

But the bigger question is....why UBI and not UBS? Maybe you think both, but it seems cart before horse to me. Universal Basic Income without Universal Basic Healthcare seems a poor band-aid

I just don’t understand why it must be ~universal.

I'm fine with the universal part (same w free college, healthcare) - any universal benefit is harder to remove once its out in the wild and in use. But this is why it works better as service rather than income, at point of need.

maybe I'm wrong on UBI, I don't really have a solid position on it, but I've definitely moved from a "sure, why not, give it a go" position to "hmm, I'm not so sure about this" over the last year or two.

it's exciting and useful as a way of reframing welfare/transfers and I can see why it's particularly appealing and charged in the US. as a side-effect of that some ppl have got overexcited and sometimes it's oversold. I also think there's a whiff off its hype in the tory govt's new 'universal credit' scheme which is currently further immiserating the most vulnerable ppl in the nation through bureaucracy. afaik the most successful transfer programmes have been targeted cf. brazil where they paid money to mothers of poor families and had v good results.

One of the points of it being universal would be that it massively cuts down on the bureaucracy - as soon as there's an 'in-list' and an 'out-list', it's a target for the right in a way that, say Medicare for All isn't.

This is obviously UK-based, but I think it's of more than no relevance to the US:

https://www.thesocialreview.co.uk/2019/06/18/new-labours-lessons/

my concerns are mostly about the limits of this individualist approach to welfare. all the non-cash-transfer parts of the welfare state are already getting fucked for funding, lots of ppl have needs that require more than whatever the basic income will be and it's not hard to see how they would get squeezed to protect a big inflexible expense. plus lots of vulnerable ppl aren't so hot at managing their money, and there's an argument that the bigger project for the left should be bolstering public/common ownership

the rub is in the implementation -- SV venture capital/libertarian types are sold on it because the fine print in their proposals implies that the total expenditures would be less than the existing welfare programs

there's also strong interest in it being a federal program that includes a multiplier to adjust for differences in cost of living by location. so in california, and specifically the bay area, the amount of federal expenditures would be higher than in less populous/affluent areas

the hunter biden riff was v funny

if I was that kid I’d probably be smoking crack, too :(

Felix really seems like the only one who's not a complete nightmare to deal with in real life.

this from a jezebel takedown of red scare made me lol:

Audrey Gelman of The Wing tagged herself as a “longtime listener,” and her buddy Lena Dunham excitedly shared her fandom in a now-deleted tweet. This is despite the fact that both women have been ruthlessly mocked by Khachiyan and Nekrasova; Dunham announced that she enjoyed the show despite the pair calling her a “human beanbag.” (Gelman’s husband was also a co-host of a short-lived podcast of men recapping Red Scare, a kind of irony so circular it disappears immediately into its own collective ass.)

Pitchforkreviewsreviews.com

https://pettycartographyhome.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/img_8500.jpg

the sex pistols and nazi symbolism, finally back together again

i was a teen who read vice in the early-mid 00s and they often referred to the 90s as this period that was stultifyingly pc which the mag was a reaction to; i wonder if in the '20s we'll see a similar alt-reactionnary 'correction' to '10s wokeness and red scare is just an early example

it's inevitable

imagine Borat coming out today - or in 1991

i was born in 1991 and actually have no idea whether the 90s were actually pc

the 90s weren't pc