Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

eh, for every rust belter voter Bernie would have put "in play" with there would probably have been a Virginia voter worried about their taxes going up

didn't know chuck schumer posted here

they're using the most alarming parts of the trump win -- the harassment, the illiberalism, the racism, the links to russo-european nationalism -- as a club to beat anyone who says hillary just might have blown this a little bit. if you say the democrats should and could have done something differently, then you somehow in favor of these forces

the harassment, the illiberalism, the racism, the links to russo-european nationalism

also, butterfly theory

didn't know chuck schumer posted here

he posts as xhuxk sxhumer iirc

lol

love the show but gotta say these dudes and their cadre on twitter seem just a leeetle too sure that a lot of those trump voters aren't really racist and would have so totally voted for Bern. and shit, man, thats just wrong.

― will, Thursday, January 12, 2017 10:23 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

literally no one on the left - well at least no one were talking about in this thread - is saying bernie would have swayed trump voters, or that a move to the left will turn trump voters into future democrat voters. in fact in one of the post election shows matt made this very point, saying "fuck trump voters", which i think we can all get behind.

trump basically got the same votes as mitt romney, the swing of the dreaded WWC to trump from obama was actually fairly small (although really highlighted in the liberal media, quelle surprise). the "bernie would have won" idea is that perhaps working class people - not just white - would've turned out to vote more than they did if the dem candidate had spoke more to working class economic concerns instead of going for the now infamous chuck schumer strategy: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia".

imo both democrats and republicans have raced to the bottom to get those suburban voters

I could see republicans actually liking a stronger presence further to the left because they'd have a counterpoint to debate against instead of the current neoliberal glut where they're pushing further on stupid positions in order to create a voting bloc. When, in the search of something to stand for, you come up with "strip all the healthcare from people we possibly can" and "guns should be available to all people in all places at all times" your platform is bankrupt

but at least you stand for something!!

i think this is why things like chapo are valuable: the 'infighting' just has to be gotten on with. it can't be avoided, the differences are real.

what are you supposed to do with sentiments like these?

https://twitter.com/smoothkobra/status/819425543464583168

https://twitter.com/carlckitchen/status/819795551822565376

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C16sGQyXEAEyIhR.jpg

this last person worked for newt gingrich for a while! i mean, fine, there's mercenaries in DC, but come on

ftr i don't think the dem primary was 'rigged' or that sanders was cheated out of it or something. HRCs vote margins were unfakeable and his strength in the odder caucus formats was (uh) problematic

sometimes I daydream about an inversion of our current political scenario where the cities are hotbeds of racist right-wing nutjobs murdering each other with their guns and no healthcare, and a minority of leftist voters in the rural heartland actually run the country thx to the institutionalized electoral apportionment flukes of our stupid system

I didn't know Fred had three Twitter accounts, weird.

idk if that Albright lady should be held up as an example of anything because she's so insanely wrong-headed about... pretty much everything

literally no one on the left - well at least no one were talking about in this thread - is saying bernie would have swayed trump voters, or that a move to the left will turn trump voters into future democrat voters.

Lol this is blatantly not true. Scroll up?

xp and that silicon valley woman who was retweeted for her stupid facebook rant that was cross-posted to facebook is straight-up one of those "stupid racists live in the middle of nowhere, fuck em" republicans in democrat clothing

I didn't know Fred had three Twitter accounts, weird.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), 13. januar 2017 19:17 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I get my information from SNL, so I know full well that Clinton could have supported gay marriage earlier, thank you very much.

that NRO profile was surprisingly good! thanks for sharing, simon

is that reaction amongst "the people" or the people on twitter?

― duped and used by my worst Miss U (President Keyes)

a small minority giving a shit about stuff like this is a big step up from this time last year. also, it's pretty much all the people you actually need.

it might convert a few people who voted out of a will to blow up the system because it gives them nothing

more likely it would attract different people who are marginally attached to politics (for the same reasons) and stayed home

it's more likely that *both* of those slices of people could be motivated by star qualities/likability/charisma that obama had in spades and HRC didn't -- not policy shifts! which is something to keep in mind

xp to d-40

xp and that silicon valley woman who was retweeted for her stupid facebook rant that was cross-posted to facebook is straight-up one of those "stupid racists live in the middle of nowhere, fuck em" republicans in democrat clothing

― mh 😏, Friday, January 13, 2017 12:21 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jesus yes this woman was police

literally no one on the left - well at least no one were talking about in this thread - is saying bernie would have swayed trump voters, or that a move to the left will turn trump voters into future democrat voters.

Lol this is blatantly not true. Scroll up?

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Friday, January 13, 2017 10:20 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh did some ilx poster say it? they say a lot of things

Bernie is a unique figure in american politics; there's probably no one alive Dems can run with as pure a record as him and left will prob unilaterally hate everyone they run. Booker, Cuomo may be particularly bad but i'm skeptical that these people will be satisfied with someone just a little better

celebrities! don't u read Jeet Heer (lol, like that's a name)

i think we need to distinguish between "democrats who really did fall in love with bernie" and "leftists who were excited that social democracy looked like it had a shot in democratic politics"

sounds like a funny podcast!

(lol, like that's a name)

what is the point of statements like these

I like to listen to podcasts along with audiobooks they pass the time on my commute

Fwiw I think many of us are in agreement but it's kind of a threading the needle thing, and from my experience in whatever my online bubble happens to be, I've been much more resistent to the dirtbag left (speaking of the world they inhabit not the podcast itself)'s self conception as the true leftists or w/e, which I intend not as a critique from the center, but from 1. The (coughs) "identarian left" and 2. A more philosophical argument about the nature of politics as a performance and the left's insistence on an educated/rational "authority" that half the country is quite perceptively dismissive of

insistence on an educated/rational "authority" that half the country is quite perceptively dismissive of

this def sounds like a losing stratagem

i think we need to distinguish between "democrats who really did fall in love with bernie" and "leftists who were excited that social democracy looked like it had a shot in democratic politics"

― goole

i'm not sure there many, if any, of the latter. most leftists i know seem to have developed a pretty strong commitment to the failure narrative. if bernie had won plenty of leftists would be denouncing him as a "sell-out" right now.

what is the 'failure narrative'

sort of moving the goalposts so that they never manage to get anything they want. it's kind of, uh... like the way PETA operates. anything that isn't outrage or doesn't allow them to be outraged seems to not be particularly useful to them.

that's dumb

like bernie voters were super butthurt he didn't get the nomination lol

I love the NRO headline, they decided to blow their audience's mind right off the bat with "no, really, there are people to the LEFT of Obama and Clinton!!!"

i'm not talking bernie voters here, i'm talking about people for whom bernie was totally compromised and implicated because he chose to run as a democrat.

So, like the 15 Stalinists who still live in the US?

really? am i really friends with half the communists in the united states? i mean. i guess it makes me feel better that most people aren't that silly, but considering i've never been a red myself i'm not sure how that happened.

jesus people how did you not get sick of this argument like two months ago.

why are you replaying the same discussion over and over like obsessively reliving the circumstances of the trauma of some psychic wound while circling around the absent subject

http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/better-red-than-dead-3.png

jesus people how did you not get sick of this argument like two months ago.

why are you replaying the same discussion over and over like obsessively reliving the circumstances of the trauma of some psychic wound while circling around the absent subject

― the klosterman weekend (s.clover)

i think you've answered your own question

while the failure narrative definitely applies to PETA, I don't think the Chapo guys are into that at all, and they don't come off as fatalistic or rigid...

yeah sorry if i'm confusing anybody here, i really have no opinion at all on the chapo house trap guys except that they make way more money than i do for talking shit on the internet and i am jealous.

speaking as a vegan i think PETA are huge dickbags but tbh any and all animal rights activism is per se going to be unsuccesful because people don't give a shit about animals, politics are a little bit less of a fruitless task

no thread is safe from this crap apparently

fuck. yeah. my fault guys sorry.

my point is the trap house dudes et al are aggressively antagonistic towards the center left where there should be coalition building, and weirdly deferential to "working class" whites who are unapologetically racist and will happily live in a card board box under a bridge as long as the brown ppl don't even have a box and Trump 'sticks it' to those PC latte losers

speaking as someone who really doesn't give a shit about animals i think animal rights activism is a much less thankless task than a lot of vegans assume. i was reading a couple weeks ago about "snow buddies", which was just a horrible unmitigated disaster. peta found out about it and asked disney not to release it, but disney ignored them and peta apparently didn't ever follow up on it because they have this point of view that everything is horrible and are apparently congenitally unable to commit to any sort of concrete actions to advocate for animal rights. the film went straight to video, made millions, and nobody knew anything about it until it became an internet meme. yeah congratulations peta you're less effective than internet memes at advocating for animal rights.

why bother apologizing if you're just going to piss all over it in the next paragraph xp

no thread is safe from this crap apparently

fuck. yeah. my fault guys sorry.

my point is the trap house dudes et al are aggressively antagonistic towards the center left where there should be coalition building, and weirdly deferential to "working class" whites who are unapologetically racist and will happily live in a card board box under a bridge as long as the brown ppl don't even have a box and Trump 'sticks it' to those PC latte losers

― will, Friday, January 13, 2017 11:52 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this isn't true.

Fwiw I think many of us are in agreement but it's kind of a threading the needle thing, and from my experience in whatever my online bubble happens to be, I've been much more resistent to the dirtbag left (speaking of the world they inhabit not the podcast itself)'s self conception as the true leftists or w/e, which I intend not as a critique from the center, but from 1. The (coughs) "identarian left" and 2. A more philosophical argument about the nature of politics as a performance and the left's insistence on an educated/rational "authority" that half the country is quite perceptively dismissive of

One issue I have with the dirtbag left, or at least with its twitter manifestation, is that the glee with which it bashes “identitarian” overreach started to have more than whiff of anti-feminist backlash at a certain point. It feels like once a day some random activist posts something silly like this:

https://twitter.com/sam_kriss/status/819282452707479552

and it becomes a focal point of mockery for the weird/left twittersphere.

And I get it sometimes, people post some silly stuff, and some twitter activist celebs (@shanley for instance) are obviously just baiting everyone. And I think there’s definitely something to the central critique that some of the stuff that gets called “identity politics” can be easily co-opted and used to lend legitimacy to unjust systems without creating change. But the way that the weird/left twitter sets its targets on a particular type of "intersectional" twitter activist got pretty tiresome to me at a certain point.

I say this not to condemn CTH, which I’ve only listened to once. I’m talking about the “dirtbag left” part of this thread’s title.

what are the demographics of the dirtbag left

relatedly, what are the demographics of chappie trap house

genuine q idk anything about these memesters and I haven't heard this podcast