Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

this is going to be fun to hear about on the show

Rod getting deported from Hungary is the sad adult version of Aslan sending the human children back to their world at the end of every adventure. pic.twitter.com/6sPZUMI8BK

— Unworthy Hand (@kisstheblade_) June 17, 2022

so you know how everyone already fucking knew where this shit was going and decided to enable it anyway

If they are "freed up" at all now that they have won compulsory motherhood, they have already turned toward anti-LGBTQ politics and broader Christian nationalist efforts to undermine the public good—education, health care, voting— pic.twitter.com/UGuPclxbSZ

— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) July 9, 2022

Did you bother to skim the opinion piece to see if she was championing Dobbs or the pro-life movement? "Not holding my breath" seems to indicate that she thinks they're full of shit.

no I didn't. stop pretending you don't know what this is

I'm pretty sure I know exactly what it is - meaningless pap promoting cradle to grave social democracy (we all agree everyone should support comprehensive pre- and post-partum care, right?) through the lens of the "pro-life" movement's hypocrisy on that matter (as they all suddenly pretend that no, they really want that care too).

Bruenig's problem isn't that she's some kind of crypto-reactionary it's that she exists in the clickbait economy of op-eds and so needs to frame her good idea as a Serious Consideration of the implications of what the pro-life movement claims to believe.

so we all exist within clickbait capitalism and whatever also she and whatever left tendency she is a part of is actually reactionary as has been repeatedly demonstrated

like do you how many actual nazis are in her likes/replies

I know but do you?

whatever. it's just frustrating and depressing how this shit plays out

it's like certain online left adjacent types decided about 5 years ago that alt right memelord bullshit was a fun and effective way to purge the cringe from their ranks and now they always seem to be on the verge of raving about degenerates ruining socialism. don't tell me it isn't a thing

Even if I actually understood any of that, I have no idea what it would have to do with Bruenig (who's not a socialist).

I like her husband who isn’t a weirdo tradcath or even religious at all afaict? weird pairing. had he just never seen a titty before or what

not talking about EB she has a more lib media respectability affect although her stans are absolutely those people

I was okay with her until I learned she’s a convert. Like who converts to Catholicism in the 21st century who isn’t a ghoul like Tony Blair or Newt Gingrich

If you really want the incense and ritual and apostolic succession is important to you there’s Episcopalianism

Maybe she didn't read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe until after college.

Oh come on, she converted in 2014, surely the high water mark year of Catholicism

It’s something she’s written about extensively and it’s not particularly interesting. She was an active Methodist who got an MPhil in Theology and decided that the Augustinian approach aligned better with her religious values, and values as a socdem, than the tradition she was raised in. I’m not sure she has a relationship with the institution of the US Catholic Church now, or if she does she usually only talks about it negatively.

I don't think paying attention to liz bruenig did absolutely anything to the abortion rights conflict in either direction. I understand giving people the side-eye when they'd give her a platform, or whatever we're calling it these days, but she's an incredibly minor figure who will speak about her personal morality, which people will confuse (and she does, personally) with aggregate politics that don't care about that. I think Melissa Gira Grant, whose writing I appreciate, is rightfully rolling her eyes at this article but I doubt she'd argue the stance of the article is anything of substance

At this point there are possibly a dozen people in the US who aren't already convinced that strong social protections and subsidies are needed in healthcare, childcare, etc. who could read an article like that and come to some epiphany. The real target audience is people who want their instinct that anti-abortion people are reasonable but hypocritical validated

or rather, that anti-abortion people could be reasonable but they're too busy being hypocritical

I’m Christian so, naturally, I know some anti-abortion chuds. I’ve seen many of them advocate for exactly what Bruenig is describing with surprisingly little pushback. I feel like we’re now in this shitty situation where these dipshits will claim they support these policies, but, unlike abortion, their advocacy will be strictly limited to posts, during this exact moment, on social media and quickly forgotten.

I think that people don't realize that, in their efforts to square their personal morality with the effects of law, by being ambivalent to anti-abortion legislation they instantly align themselves with some wretched people who truly just want to punish women

at some point in the past I'd probably have thought phrasing it that way was over the top, but having lived this long, I don't think it's an exaggeration

she's a marginal figure but this sort of conservative tendency has a history of consuming embattled lefts in times of crisis. this is how you get fascism and stalinism and new labour

if anyone on the left is putting out feelers of equivocal support for christian fascist austerity politics it's a real problem and I wish the response was less mealy mouthed that's all

embattled Lefts more like

austerity

Looks a lot like the opposite.

The Atlantic is just a weird zombie of a publication propped up by Melinda Gates and company, this weird ostensibly liberal thing that waffles between "republicans are mean" crap, very rote coverage of some news items, and occasional truly objectionable trans panic garbage and baffling articles that are more objectionable than whatever this Bruenig crap is

I mean, they've got a David Frum-penned Shinzo Abe hagiography on the front page that's probably an order of magnitude worse

xp i mean necropolitical austerity more than fiscal austerity though it can be both (as in the case of the NHS, or european social democracy in general)

the thing is no one thinks melinda gates or david frum are comrades

nobody you're honking off about has featured liz bruenig on a podcast or even mentioned her for what seems like eons

how do i make it clear the tendency is the problem and not whatever individuals i use as examples or whether they're currently on some sex pest podcast. i can keep giving more examples but it always turns into a referendum on the person and their morality every time in what feels like an exercise in deliberate point missing. like didn't this just happen with the kamala thing on the other thread

maybe posting things to threads purely based on a negative association in your mind in an attempt to do some sort of vague dunk on an undifferentiated mass of posters is counterproductive?

Not sure how to read a thread revive about Bruenig's abortion op-ed as being not about Bruenig at all.

i'm pissed off at podcasters/columnists/influencers more than posters for the most part although it is infuriating when ppl pretend not to see the most obvious shit xp you know it's not-not about her but that she's not the point you know this shit isn't as atomised as the norms of liberal discourse demand you pretend it is. come on ffs

gets deep in the woods on some conservative nerd shit but I really enjoyed the latest KYE crossover ep

Overall like the Korea Blowback intro but I can’t stand the left tic of saying “it’s not as bad as you might think in North Korea, not saying it’s a lovely place to live but it gets turned into a cartoon.” I guess maybe every single escapee account I’ve read could just be state dept propaganda, but then you don’t have to be an escapee from most countries in the first place.

well, not yet anyway

I haven’t listened to it but will prob get to it later this week

The Unit 684 story is wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_684

this seemed interesting, so i listened to about half. i will get to the rest eventually.

i want to respond to the post about the left tic of saying north korea is lovely.

there are some refugee interviews that paint a more complicated picture. some of the interviewees are homesick. of course, these are in the context of arriving in the south and finding it to be less pleasant than they imagined. however, there is limited access to these in english translation, or they appear in obscure korea institute for national unification publications. i remember reading one series that stuck with me (this is in an article about media consumption called "forbidden audience"): three young people are quoted and say that the thing they miss most about north korea was that there was no pressure. since family connections were the only way to rise, there was no pressure to study. they were free to fool around. one boy reminisces fondly about the group fights he took part in. one girl says that it would be a paradise for children, if there was enough to eat.

but there wasn't enough to eat, at least for her. the defensiveness on north korea does seem misguided. it is not as bad as you might think. it is more normal than you might think. if you are in your teens or twenties or even your early thirties, you have mostly seen standards of living improve. but i don't see what's wrong with point out that it's not a paradise on earth, especially if you are trying to make some anti-imperialist point. it's fair to admit that some of what we know about north korea is not a cartoon. and not all but a large part of the reason that north korea has still not recovered fully from the 1990s is because of the program of sanctions.

in bad country, police can murder the populace without consequence and government locks up 639 out of every 100,000 people, the highest rate in the world

well, not yet anyway

^scans as glib and def that wasnt my intention.

i do often (prob too often) find myself contemplating how a series of snapshots just from the last couple of years might play out if we weren't the world's hegemonic colossus. another much more powerful nation with with opposed interests and an insanely deep-pocketed & well-oiled propaganda arm could probably make hay out of a Uvalde mom being monitored and harassed by the force (likely the only municipal endeavor her town will fund with public dollars) that was too incompetent and cowardly to stop a teenager from murdering her kid. or a homeless person in LA--possibly due to medical debt, or more likely, the flood of opioids courtesy of Sackler family greed, protected and subsidized at every level by the federal govt--being shuttled out to the desert to die of dehydration in our richest state and the world's 6th largest economy. a Ferguson resident living for years under what amounts to an occupying imperial force that murders with impunity, all while being a short drive to suburbs/ exurbs full of American flags and platitudes about FREEDOM stuck to every other 70k truck bumper. and coming soon: 11 year old rape victims being forced to carry a pregnancy to term, or women arrested and possibly imprisoned for having an entropic pregnancy who seek out a solution that would save their lives. if these people were to escape and given asylum by a world power opposed to our economy, or way of life or very existence, i suspect the rest of the 'civilized' world's already grim view of the US would be magnified and multiplied in ways that could seem like a funhouse mirror to the more comfortable among us here.

US has a perfect mix of empathetic people who nonetheless get overwhelmed and prob fatigued by everything flying at you faster and more horrific than the month or year before,,
aand those we'll call "less charitable" who can always always reason away that for most or even all of these afflicted, they’re at their very core somehow at fault and deserve it.

As much as we could do the thought experiment of "what would it look like if you just took a bunch of snapshots of US life and compared them to North Korea," I find it very hard to believe that, on average, life is better (or, indeed, not significantly worse) there than here. I mean there's like a 42% estimated malnutrition rate (1% in the US). The US's contribution to the conditions that created that situation is a different question, but I feel like it really undermines the point when we get these smug, gotcha comparisons.

there are lots of non-sanctioned countries that can match those numbers (one being Yemen, despite all the weapons we keep selling to the country that murdered one of our journalists)
i also believe that our good fortune wrt nutrition and basically everything else is very much at the expense of the global south.

i'm really not trying to do a gotcha. it's just like, where in the actual fuck do we get off, you know?

Then it’s good news that the people behind many of the things you disapprove of are pretty cool with NK now.

Really want to see a movie based on Unit 684 from the John Wick crew.

what would happen if you were able to merge the US and NK in a reality warping machine?

we’ve got a 41.9% obesity rate, which makes me wonder if someone already used such a machine to divide a hypothetical country into two in our world

they would cancel out any redeeming features of each other and it would be the most horrifying dystopia imaginable

well, that’s one take

NK: hey, they have a low BMI at least

what would happen if you were able to merge the US and NK in a reality warping machine?

they would cancel out any redeeming features of each other and it would be the most horrifying dystopia imaginable

the UK

authoritarian nanny state stripped of any non-punitive or notionally egalitarian commitments... rampant capitalist development without any dynamism or social mobility... state enforced for-profit cult over a hereditary elite whose crimes put the kims' to shame...

shame is v out of style everywhere tbh