Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

re: mutual aid. it's the only thing. i wouldn't have to think about this other shit at all except that i actually tried to engage with the establishment left and i had to learn about all this shit to make sense of why it wasn't working for me

if the US left is better at this irl then i am glad. all i know is what i see online

We don’t have an establishment left here afaict

get him to the greek

I need to study up on my podcasts I guess

left pretty much totally otm despite their abrasive manner

bruenig has posted more extensively about being anti-abortion in the past, she's just smart enough to have realised now that her position on it is extremely niche and makes her no friends at all on either the left or the right, so she now much prefers to be quiet about it rather than actively courting controversy with it. https://bypass.theweek.com/articles/447812/why-im-prolife-liberal here is an article of hers from 2014, before she had the platform she does now.

she's typically pretty evasive on queer issues but with her general commitment to catholic social values and https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-there-a-christian-way-to-be-gay/ this book review which largely endorses the author's approach (the way to be a good gay catholic is to be celibate), i am very much with those who are not very fond of her. she's not very vocal about her catholic social values these days beyond all the pro-family stuff and the occasional twitter beef that she starts by criticising people (often queer) who make criticism of the family structure etc. but that's why when she does write her pro-family stuff like that latest article it annoys a lot of her critics (personally i don't really care that much about that part of it but the twitter fights she starts are terrible)

idk if she's ever been explicitly transphobic but accusing berlatsky of pedophilia in the exchange posted earlier was just terrible and she didn't apologise for it. while it's true that singal deliberately took the screenshot out of context to make berlatsky seem more ridiculous and remove the context of singal's transphobia etc., just bruenig being friendly with singal is red flag enough for 'sympathetic to transphobia' on top of the 'strong believer in catholic social values' thing honestly.

re: 'what does post-left mean on twitter' it's just the red scare/aimee terese/stupidpol axis of "the left needs to be more bigoted in general to appeal to the working class"/social conservatism justified with terrible applications of marxist theory. some of it's just a transparent grift of course but there's a lot of idiots who seem to believe this shit for real. obviously has nothing to do with the previous nihilist etc. meaning that left (poster) brought up, i think someone (aimee?) just started using it and it caught on to describe that position.

"accusing berlatsky of pedophilia" is laying it on a bit thick tbh. she posted a snarky tweet not a police report

i'm sorry but I've seen all this evidence before and it leaves you with the impression she's a social conservative who pretty much never publicly endorses social conservatism except if you read into her petty twitter beefs or whatever.

if there was even the slightest hint of actual problematic shit in what she's published since actually gaining an audience I would change my tune in a heartbeat I do not actually care to defend tradcaths believe it or not

if writing for that nazi buchanan/taki rag (something i didn't know about) doesn't make it clear enough then nothing will

Nobody denied that Bruenig had Catholic social values. The question is, so what? Left said that having idiosyncratic personal views that one doesn’t advocate for publicly is analogous to being an abuser, and people “defending” such people are using the same rhetorical moves as people who defend abusers. He is just taking it as a given that his own position is maximally virtuous and anything that departs from it is hateful and must be stamped out. As if only moderates and centrists have covered for bad people in the past and the far-left has a clean track record! This self righteous attitude is endemic in the on the left, with disagreement regularly being conflated with harm.

I would consider it harmful and not merely a difference of opinion if she was out there using her incredibly massive platform to say "abortion is bad" tbf

Even here, you are calling the American Conservative a Nazi publication rather than a paleoconservative one. What is the point of that? And now that I point it out I will be seen as “defending” the bad people rather than just trying to push back against out of control rhetoric.

Xp

You don’t need to support something or even have sympathy for it to bristle against this kind of overheated, inaccurate type of speech.

Like, there are individuals I don’t like, people who bullied me in school, bosses who were disrespectful of my time and contribution etc. But if someone came on here and started misrepresenting any of these people I would object to that too. People can be jerks and not genocidal rapists or whatever.

since when was pat buchanan not a nazi or paleowhatever not a euphemism for fascism. never mind forget it

it's a reactionary magazine for sure. i would not write for it personally.

lmao she wrote for the american conservative, that's hilarious

I’m not quite following this “we shouldn’t hold
individuals up as archetypes representing issues and political movements” point you’re making, Left, when the other point seems to be “we need to throw this person out with the dishwater because they have a bad stance on one issue they no longer speak about publicly”

in my experience, most people reading articles that are forwarded to them, unless they’re linked to a book or a series, barely notice who wrote a piece let alone research the writer’s last decade

"accusing berlatsky of pedophilia" is laying it on a bit thick tbh. she posted a snarky tweet not a police report

insinuating he was a pedophile then. it was wildly inappropriate of her to just throw around something like that, come on lol. i would dislike her just for being pals with singal (which is more than just that one tweet) even without any of the other reasons really.

she's a social conservative who pretty much never publicly endorses social conservatism

she has publicly endorsed 'abortion is bad' plenty of times. while her position is less terrible than the evangelical one of criminalising abortion it's still not good and she used to talk about it on twitter and in her writing much more. as i said, she's been smart enough to quiet down about that more recently to avoid controversy, but it was a deliberate move she only made after her views apparently caused too much dsa/twitter drama sometime in 2018. like yes her soc-dem opinion columns these days are generally fine enough but it's certainly frustrating that such a prominent voice of the left in the media these days still has views wildly out of step on a number of important issues.

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2016/10/28/pro-life-millennial-women-speak-out here's her appearing in a pro-life propaganda video by a catholic publication
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/pro-life-anti-poverty/ here's another of her early pieces (again for the american conservative lol)

Does she also think we fought on the wrong side of WW2?

lmao she wrote for the american conservative, that's hilarious

one thing which this entire conversation is ignoring is the possibility that people can in fact change. would EB still write for The American Conservative now? what if she was antagonistic to certain progressive principles before but has relaxed her views? should it not be seen as a triumph if a former conservative turns Good; should we not celebrate the prodigal returned?

not saying she HAS changed, more gesturing to the possibility of it and therefore the potentially uncharitable nature of 'check the history', as though a person is a fully carved block as soon as they establish themselves in the public eye

thank you for the links, ufo, that does change things considerably imo. The Week is not an obscure publication by any means, and that piece clearly suggests that abortion should be illegal. Softening that to "Catholic social values" is disturbing.

The pro-life leftist position maintains that human life is so significant, so inherently valuable, so irreplaceable that it should be the central subject of political concern. This view requires, therefore, that since we care enough about the outcome of pregnancy to insist against abortion, then we must continue to care about the outcome when abortion is no longer a legal option.

xp well, if she's since retracted this view publicly, sure

i'm not sure if that's exactly what she was advocating there though you can certainly read it that way (it's a little vague) and i'd honestly forgotten about that part of it. regardless though for quite some time her views have been 'abortion shouldn't be criminalised just unwanted pregnancies reduced through better welfare for parents'. by 'before she had the platform' i meant having risen to the prominence she has now since she became a wapo columnist in 2017 and then nyt columnist last year.

people can still like her soc-dem opinion pieces if they want but i did want to make it clear to those who were confused as to why she is so criticised just what the issues were

mh: there is no reason why this has to be about her specifically but why am i (or any other critic that none of these people need to even hear about to be defended from) represented as holding all the cards here? why not look at how things actually stand right now instead of what they might look like in some sort of slippery slope dystopia if i get what is assumed to be my way?

there is a strange kind of substitutionism going on here when one relatively prominent person is taken to symbolically represent non-conformists in general and it's bizarre to say the least how the demands for conformity are being represented and who they're being attributed to in this discourse. considering (yet again) the glaring asymmetries of social and other kinds of capital here

This is bullshit. You are claiming the right to be uncharitable to your opponents and tag them with nefarious innuendo. I am saying this is a bad way to be, regardless of how influential it is as a way of being. Not everything is a meta power analysis.

actually it is

Thank you to ufo for providing the links here; as a Catholic the insistence of atheists (mainly men lbr) shielding EB from criticism because she’s Catholic is deeply odd. Her views aren’t just to the right of me on this matter, they’re to the right of 2/3 of modern Ireland. And far from the views making her unacceptable to the right, the opposite is true. People who criticise her on twitter get harassed endlessly by all her red-brown fans, she is very much in favour with a certain swathe of that audience and her views are the reason why.

ugh.

I’m not speaking to LB here (I absolutely have no horse in this race, etc) but the entire idea of reproductive rights as a wedge issue in the US was nearly completely defined by cynical strategists and opportunistic religious leaders who thought yoking their church to a political movement would further their goals. Or in the case of more socially-conservative Catholics, a way to peel off voters from a historically democratic party voting block.

We’ve seen social issues get peeled away from the platform of that block, but their strategy worked and as soon as you mention certain reproductive health organizations the revulsion from the majority of non-religious, socially liberal republicans, isn’t a moral one, it’s a distinct reaction to what they see as partisan institutions

I have no idea what the solution is, but it’s not defining social issues as distinctively along party lines

I agree with mh

(that ugh was to prior posts and not gyac most definitely)

Who is taking EB to symbolically represent the entire Left? One of our general side got snuck into the NYT sure but not even their most pigshit corpo-lib readership would take her to symbolise the entire Left. She doesn't do enough televised debates for a start. (Owen Jones otoh lol)

fwiw scoping this out a couple decades might be useful because I can’t even begin to pretend to understand the modern democratic catholic base, especially those like LB who converted in 2014 (!)

Mate, you’ve made it clear you simp for her, it’s ok

Not everything is a meta power analysis.

― treeship

actually it is

― Left

this explains a lot

(And that was not at mh either)

I'm just joining in the fun

Must be nice for it to be an abstract matter for you.

xp probably pointlessly xposted by now, sorry

I found the vagueness to be clearly deliberate. I don't think you can read that piece and not conclude that she thinks abortion should be illegal, even if that obviously isn't her area of political concern. To me it read as: pro-life conservatives are right about the immorality and therefore illegality of abortion ("While their arguments are in the right spirit"; "I find the usual right-wing anti-abortion approach underwhelming and incomplete," i.e., not wrong just lopsided), but they're wrong in pursuing penality as the primary social mechanism for reducing demand.

To be clear, I agree with her about all the social programs the US should have to help parents. Where I live, there is universal health care, parental leave is 15 months, and daycare is heavily subsidized. These programs are massively beneficial to everyone and needn't be justified with arguments about restricting reproductive autonomy.

The matter of abortion is extremely concrete for me: it should be legal and freely available to all at all times. The matter of whether EB is a bad person whom we shouldn't listen to or read the work of is a completely separate matter, and sure, probably quite an abstract one, as I neither particularly stan nor condemn

She does seem quite nice tho ngl

xxp i agree with your interpretation, it’s why I don’t consider her a person worth reading. But then my politics are shaped by my life and my upbringing, not abstract notions like “seems nice”.

thanks for the links, ufo.

as someone who partially credits unapologetic Atheism (pre-IDW assholes) with the initial break from my very conservative, evangelical-adjacent upbringing and spent most of my 30s as a semi-ironic anti-natalist (fuckthemkids.jpg), I’ve long been suspicious of the (mostly) online trad-cath types ive run across. I think I softened somewhat in the last few years, primarily in the interest of coalition-building. my ex was heavily involved in the MidSouth Peace & Justice Center (https://midsouthpeace.org/about-us/), who are some rad folks, and initially started by lefty Catholics in Memphis. and yeah, some—mostly the OGs—were nominally pro-life, but were in touch w reality enough to know that’s simply untenable as a matter of policy.

my unsolicited advice to those who travel in these circles (and I doubt theyre are any here, even lurking) is maybe keep it to yourself until we have a robust, cradle-to-the-grave welfare state, on par with the most luxurious Nordic model available.

and even then, just maybe fuck off and have your 7 kids and enjoy it. abortion free and on demand forever.

I'm glad you brought up anti-natalism because that's also fueling this to some extent

maybe keep it to yourself until we have a robust, cradle-to-the-grave welfare state, on par with the most luxurious Nordic model available

I agree w this

Skipping back a little, I was curious about this bit:

i am for the margins and the lumpen more than anything

Understandable desires, of course, but do you favor this leaning out of moral or strategic reasons?

I can try to rationalise it in either of those terms but it's just an emotional impulse

What in fucking god's name would inspire someone to convert to Catholicism.

Holy Ghost innit

Need for ritual? Fed up with what passes for American Protestantism, especially the Evangelical strain?