this Freddie deBoer thing (the bit about mini-Hollywoods specifically, combined with context from his previous output) is just...
this Freddie deBoer thing (the bit about mini-Hollywoods specifically, combined with context from his previous output) is just the latest in a series of rumbles suggesting that the most important effect of Chapo Trap House is that it’s serving as the seed for NYC young media mutual-promotion cliques alternative to the reigning ones that grew out of Mid-2000s Salon/Gawker Media/feminist blogs and have been responsible for so much of the cancer in our culture since they started assuming editorships a few years ago
This is analytically true, but there’s no reason that an ideological culturkampf made from failsons with a focus on socialism and hating bankers will actually be less toxic. “Currently powerless” is not the same thing as “innocent.”
every hegemony is toxic but there’s an incubation period before they get to that level so you need to keep cycling through them for hygienic reasons! it’s the same as how you have to dump political incumbents every 10 years or so
I get what you mean, but remember that power is local. It’s very easy for an ideology to obsess about its impotence in other realms (like the Mideast, or Red State America) and use that as an excuse to demand orthodoxy and hyper-vigilance from people in their immediate sphere. So it doesn’t take very long before the new ideology is secure enough to bend the truth and show intolerance to people in their own little community (I’m looking at you, rationalism.)
It’s not inevitable for every belief system, but you have to show a commitment to not dehumanizing people, not choosing glibness over complicated truth, and not justifying beliefs out of fear, not blame oppression on individual moral failings over systems, and not being vulnerable to memetic efficiency, before you’re out of the woods of being Just Another Ideology. Chapo Traphouse has not done that (despite the Brooklyn-Marxist True Left’s concrete policy goals being closer to mine than any other group out there.)
Despite the veneer of detached irony poisoning, the chapo trap house subreddit is the exact same fetid pool of rotting shit I’d expect from shitty internet communists anywhere, and I assume that it represents the community.
I haven’t been called a fascist for not condemning the existence of Israel anywhere else ever.
There’s also performative condemning of tankies alongside cheerful gulag “”“”“jokes”“”“”
Yeah and on Twitter I see all these new rose-emoji names who joined/started DSA chapters at their grad schools doing the same seething at them for exiting the Vampire Castle and like as the classic question goes
Q: is some jerk going to try to schism my Marxist party out from under me?
A: some jerk is going to try to schism your Marxist party out from under you