Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

Perot, though not an actual celeb, had the proto-Trump press sensitivity and sold himself as outsider-businessman who could come in and fix it all with business skills

yeah jesse was okay like i said but the combative stuff w/the press and being thin skinned was really similar

plus just the whole weird energy around his candidacy was similar

The Dollop having not so secretly become 50% a labor history podcast is probably Good but I can’t really stand to entertain myself with all that strike-breaking

It really is amazing to listen to early, carefree episodes where Dave seems practically apolitical then compare it to like, the Wells Fargo episode

the dollop is secretly the longform story of dave’s radicalisation

my gf likes to listen to podcasts while going to sleep and a lot of the dollop ones have really enervated me while in a delicate hypnagogic state

that said, the Boston Corbett episode contains maybe the single funniest moment of any podcast

the gay-panic in the navy episode remains my favourite, just batshit from start to finish

What name / # was that one? Doesn't ring a bell.

#56, the Newport sex scandal

if you haven’t heard it you’re in for a treat

I think Pareene mentioned that Reagan was just Trump who could actually stay on script and listen to his handlers

schwarzenegger was a weirdly decent California gov

I gotta say, the Dollop episode on John McCain -- which, yes, admittedly focuses on every shitty thing he ever did, at the expense of most other considerations -- not only taught me a few things I hadn't heard about or knew very little detail about, and convinced me of its thesis that he was absolutely a proto-Trump in terms of his fictitious persona and cozy media relationship. (Complete with sketchy Manafort/Russia content!)

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Wednesday, 14 November 2018 13:30 (two days ago) Permalink

I don't love the hosts' style, but this was good. I think you can kind of make "the case against" any national politician with a long enough career, and I had previously kind of thought of John McCain that way, like, yeah he's a republican and he sucks more than people think, but he probably tries to do the right thing when he can even though his conception is flawed. After listening to this however I think he's just a shitty human being who only did the "right" thing ever for self-serving reasons. I had associated him with campaign finance reform, but now I'm thinking that was probably just part of his media strategy to cover up for how thoroughly corrupt he was.

They started out as a straightforward comedy show and have only "radicalized" gradually. The style and content are sometimes an odd fit.

Also they ended the show with some hippie dippie shit about starting an art therapy group about global warming or something

one glaring omission from that dollop episode was that hours after the forrestal disaster, while the flames were still burning on the ship, mccain hopped in a helicopter with the media and gave an interview to the new york times while sipping cocktails in saigon, which he called 'welcome r&r' in his autobiography

unauthorised r&r too iirc

@man alive yeah that's Dave's own initiative...it sounds silly but well- intentioned to me.

fwiw they repeated a couple claims that I can't find any verification of, particularly the one that he gave up information to the Vietnamese. That looks like it may have been an invented campaign smear.

a lot of it seemed based on this (excellent) roilling stone piece https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/john-mccain-make-believe-maverick-202004/ which includes quotes from one of his fellow captives

There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain’s broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.

But the subsequent tale of McCain’s mistreatment — and the transformation it is alleged to have produced — are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they “give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades.” Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number — and to make no “statements disloyal to my country.”

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. “I had to tell them,” he insisted to Dramesi, “or I would have died in bed.”

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”

They list their sources on their Libsyn page, but they haven't been added for that ep yet. But the RS piece seems likely, yeah.

after reading Rick Perlstein on the insanity of Stockdale and the other POWs enforcing that Code, I'm hesitant to tut-tut McCain for breaking it

no shame from me on mccain (or anyone else) for breaking under torture, which i'm sure i would do pretty much immediately - i was just providing the source for man alive

giving up info to the vietnamese may be the only reasonable and relatable thing mccain did in his life tbh

Yeah I don’t blame him for that, just for the self-aggrandizement on false pretenses that followed.

otm

Yeah I appreciated that even on that pod dedicated to slamming him, they admitted they wouldn't have even held out as long

I mean really the entire "war hero" narrative and our fealty to it should die (although I doubt it ever will). What was he doing before getting captured? Bombing runs in which countless civilians surely died. I'm sure if my dad saved my ass every time I crashed and got me promoted to wherever I wanted to be, I could fly a plane and drop bombs on defenseless people just as easily as McCain did.

Though not as morally easily, I hope.

I'm of the opinion that congress does need some members who spend a fair amount of time on a soapbox both garnering media attention and attempting to rally peers to cohesive positions, but there are a handful of legislators who do so little actual legislation work because they're busy trying to elevate their own platform in an attempt to run for higher office or get a book deal or w/e

at the bare minimum the job is to attend and vote. ideally, you actually dig into legislation and sit on some committees instead of just voting however the party draws the line. if you're actually into legislation, you reach beyond cosponsoring legislation and actually introduce some of your own

when it comes to actually getting things introduced and passed into law, boring-ass grandpas like Chuck Grassley are more effective nuts-and-bolts legislators and probably change the direction of things, for better or worse, while only getting press when a specific committee (judicial, as of late) is under the spotlight

I think in the long term McCain's biggest accomplishment was to make people think he was an important figurehead and was able to parlay that into presidential runs. which has jack shit to do with the actual work of being a senator

coming to Lincoln Center

https://www.filmlinc.org/events/chapo-trap-house-presents-starship-troopers/

I am a fierce skeptic of this film btw

i like starship troopers but it’s one of verhoeven’s emptiest films—by design of course but it keeps me from ever really forming an attachment to it. it makes sense the chapo dudes would seize on its irony i guess

it's a good movie, morbs

I saw it when it came out and basically reacted is-at-all-there-is. I liked the Casper von Dien whipping scene tho.

starship troopers is fantastic, verhoeven’s second-best hollywood movie imo and just as perceptive about america as robocop

Starship Troopers is a masterpiece, maybe the scariest film I've ever seen, far from Verhoeven's emptiest film. by showing a "successful," functional fascism, Verhoeven delivers its most vivid and horrifying indictment. Verhoeven quote that sums it up:

In a 2014 interview on The Adam Carolla Show, the actor Michael Ironside, who read the novel as a youth, said that he asked Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, "Why are you doing a right-wing fascist movie?" Verhoeven replied, "If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no one will listen to me. So I'm going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing fucking Bugs!

I'm sure I've said this elsewhere, but the commentary track w/ Verhoeven and the cast is hilarious and essential

far from Verhoeven's emptiest film

didn’t say this! it’s just like: robocop skewered reaganism while layering identity crises and great character work on top of it. starship troopers doesn’t have this bc it can’t, by design. which i think is totally fine it’s just also the reason it’s not my favorite verhoeven film

"one of his emptiest movies" I still disagree with, though I understand what you mean - like you said, by design there isn't any character to identify with. it's a POV into a nightmare future. impersonal rather than empty

This has probly been addressed on another thread, but can we separate the contribution of Verhoeven vs Ed Neumeier’s scripts?

impersonal rather than empty

yeah this is prob a better characterization (i nearly typed "coldest" instead)

I'm not even sure "impersonal" is right but I'll save it for when the next one comes out

fascism doesn’t deal in anything other than absolutes, and starship troopers is a fascist propaganda movie, so it can’t be anything other than impersonal - it does a tremendous job of showing how hollow fascist art is imo

I saw it when it came out, as a 16yo who was interested why because sci-fi, and the admittedly slow realization that I was watching satire has cemented it in my brain as "very very good."

man i wasn't even that old. i read the book and liked it because i liked the aesthetic of war and fighting bugs. i liked the movie because i saw a whole bunch of nudity. i should maybe watch it again as an adult. also LOVED the website because it had games and there were leaderboards. sounds like i don't need to read the book again tho

i first saw it when i was ten. it was my friend's birthday and we snuck in

i knew something was wrong with it but i also loved it as an action spectacle which is the effect every verhoeven movie i saw way too young had on me (i watched robocop and total recall a lot as a kid)

I didn't pick up on the satire in the least when I was 12.

I remember a review in my local paper calling it "Melrose Place in deep space," so I'm not sure they did either.

I appreciate ST so much that I ill-advisedly watched the sequels out of boredom

sorry i didnt mean to derail (blame Chapo)

looks like they finally had Contrapoints on, for real this time

I was sort of hoping they'd do a B*n Sh*p*r* reading series and have her chime in or something, but this was a fine overview of her work and cast of characters. I hope it brings her a new raft of fans.