oh god

I find this tweet really funny.

I’m not sure if nobody challenged Burgis because they didn’t want to spend the next hour or more in a heated debate on interpretations of Derrida because everyone was still too traumatised from their previous experiences where this happened, if Burgis managed to stumble onto a decent interpretation of Derrida but he wasn’t aware enough to realise this fact, or if he talked absolute nonsense but due to him being a minor celebrity or the fact that it was a high level class everyone around him decided to save face and not call him on his bullshit so instead the people in the room stared at their shoes and shifted uncomfortably in their seats before someone finally broke the awkward silence with an “Oookay, moving on…”

Every scenario I can come up with is its own sort of situational humour. I suppose it’s a neat little homage to Derrida that there’s a lot of room for interpretation in the situation he described, although I’m not sure if he’d be able to spot that.

If only he had realized that that was most contemporary continental philosophy outside of maybe Wittgenstein.

They might have been an insufferable lib back then and they might be an even-more insufferable lib now but we’ll always have memories 🥰

If that doesn’t sum up their career in the spotlight, I’m not sure what would.

They deserve each other

CR was from before his time, right? It’s an okay book, I enjoyed it and it got me back into reading political theory, but I’ve leafed through it since and it’s very mid. The term Market Stalinism is extremely funny tho. Trotskyism and its consequences

I tried reading Capitalist Realism and gave up after about 20 pages. I was wondering if that was because I’m too much of a dumbass to get it, so the idea that it just might not be worth reading fills me with hope. Thank you.

I guess everyone who blames French academics for the failure of the left ends up in the same place eventually

Lmao

I’ve been doing some more digging and the COO of Lain’s new publishing group, Ashley Frawley is deep into the anti-woke stuff. Like really deep into it.

I haven’t been able to get a good read on her but she has said some odd things. Not entirely wrong but just that the framing doesn’t sit right with me - she said that Marx didn’t argue for people looking inwards to find their own happiness internally, which is true, but that The Communist Manifesto was written like an ode to capitalism and it extolled the virtues of capitalism, that Marx argued that capitalism has liberated us but in an incomplete fashion (which is true, technically, but it doesn’t come off as a genuine reading of Marx in totality but more as a cherry-picked one and it’s not a very historical reading for someone whose whole thing is historical materialism - if capitalism has liberated us, what has it liberated us from and where have we been delivered to?) and she says that Marx advocated for an expansion of production and consumption beyond what capitalism has been able to provide us. Which, again, is not untrue but it’s a very lopsided interpretation.

I wish I could find the whole interview where this was clipped from because if she’s responding to a question or it’s part of a broader point then I can see how she might find herself saying this but if she’s just saying this absent of any particular context then either she’s intentionally misrepresenting Marx to court an audience or she genuinely believes it then that’s no good.

She was also a bit disingenuous, I think, by saying that Marx was advocating for the expansion of production and consumption. Sure, he was doing that in the mid-to-late 1800s, as was everyone else at that time except for Malthusians and those who wanted to see a restoration of the feudal order, maybe. But just because Marx wanted to see the expansion of production and consumption back then doesn’t mean that he was talking about the economic conditions nearly two centuries later. Marx wasn’t one for making sweeping predictions about the future to the point where he would dictate economic policy for us today and it’s a fool’s game to play at what he would or wouldn’t have predicted. As for what Marx would say about the current state of the world if he were alive today, I think his first urge would be to identify that capitalism has reached a situation where it has externalised its contradictions to the environment and now it has reached a point where those externalities are threatening the existence of capitalism itself but, being what it is, it is fundamentally incapable of resolving this contradiction and thus the masses are faced with an urgent choice between socialism or (climate) barbarism. Not to play the “My dad could beat up your dad” card, but it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t take climate science seriously and that he wouldn’t see it as capitalism running up against a force capable of permanently hemming in the ever-expanding forces of production.

The way she talked lacked any acknowledgement of the antagonism inherent to class society. I wasn’t getting any dialectical analysis from what she was saying and whenever someone talks about Marx’s ideas without driving home the dialectical nature of his thought and how central this is, I find myself asking if they’re just simplifying it and if so, are they simplifying it to the point where they’re gutting the Marxism from Marx himself.

I wouldn’t want to call it with just the little bit that I’ve managed to find with her takes on Marx but it is enough that it makes me feel suspicious.

Peter Coffin went from middle of the road BreadTuber who was making winks and nods to being communist but who actively courted the BreadTube audience by hedging their bets and being mostly focused on anti-capitalist analysis and driving his concept of the “attention economy”, or something to that effect. They had a partner and maybe some kids with a woman who was… Irish? I think Irish. She featured in some of their videos, but not all that often.

Then suddenly, around the time where the Maupin/CPI spanking scandal drops, Peter undergoes a massive pivot, breaks up with their partner, wipes most of their old YouTube content, and becomes an avid Maupinite and has a new partner who features on their channel pretty regularly.

I remember coming across a clip of them talking about how… Maduro, maybe? Had name-dropped Maupin and the CPI in a speech and how the movement is kind of a big deal, gaining international recognition, and I thought that it must have been satire or part of a bit but, upon further investigation, it became obvious that they went all-in on Maupin for some reason.

I don’t really know what happened between them and their previous partner and I didn’t dig because their previous partner seemed to shy away from much media attention and I figured that she probably doesn’t need people getting really in her business over this. I’m sure it sucked and was awful and she just wants to move on with her life, which would be completely understandable.

Edit: Holy shit, I completely forgot that they had a fairly significant sketch comedy arc and got massively catfished by a troll or a team of trolls, some people arguing that they self-catfished in order to make themselves seem cool to others because they had a hot girlfriend (you wouldn’t know her - she goes to a different college), prior to their BreadTube arc.

Many such cases