Uh, what is “sportswashing?”

I gave Haz & Co. critical support at the beginning, only to see them get worse and worse and worse. Early on, when they were associated with CPI, their tailism was absolutely a strategy. They would say all kinds of offensive things, and pepper their speech with any number of right-wing memes and dog whistles, but you could tell that it all rested on a basic Marxist worldview. One can disagree with such tactics (I do), or find them stupid and counterproductive, but it was almost certainly sincere. Since early 2023, however, the predictable has happened, and Haz, Hinkle, etc. have become prisoners of their own brand. Now I don’t see them as trying to do anything other than a sort of 4chan with Stalinist aesthetics.

It’s a good cautionary tale, though with an obvious moral: don’t try to do all your organizing online.

To be fair, they tried doing stuff in the real world before.

As in, lazily stacking the CPUSA (America’s old Soviet-aligned communist party, that still struggles on as a kind of minor wing of the Democrats) with people who follow them on social media. This was supposed to achieve – something, though nobody I talked to could ever tell me what. When it predictably didn’t, they pulled this stunt.

These idiots really wrote their party declaration like a more obtuse version of the Declaration of Independence, huh.

Thomas Jefferson, whatever his crimes, could at least write decent prose. These jokers can’t.

AndyPants Gaming, truly a Homerically masculine name

Yeah, the Infrared crowd hates Maupin because they see him as an old fuddy-duddy who (gasp) wanted them to do real stuff in the real world, and not just be edgy online. Maupin dislikes them because (1) they rip off his ideas without attribution, and (2) they went whole hog on the “recruit from the right” thing in the dumbest way possible. And when I say dumb, I mean really dumb: as in “talk about Hegel in front an American flag bikini poster” dumb. Yes, Haz actually did this.

Basically, the way that whole sphere works is: Maupin says something that’s wrongheaded, but somewhat thought out; Haz presents it a few days later as his own, mixed with some dumbass Ned Land/Dugin/Larouche stuff; then Jackson Hinkle, Midwestern Marx, Sameera Khan, and other assorted intellectual lightweights spread it all over the internet in the form of lazy AI-generated memes. With each step the original idea gets stupider, with @REVMAXXING being the absolute nadir.

That I thought for a long time that whole crowd could reform and become principled Marxists is one of the worst blunders I’ve made.

EDIT: for instance, look at this not-very-original piece of analysis. I think my dog could come up with something about as profound, and I don’t even have a dog. Face of modern communism, anybody?

Cave Man Xi would be an awesome meme, by the way.

Classic youtube comment section

And who chose a stripper name for his Very Serious Politics Channel

Arguing with liberals does indeed give me the feeling that they’re just reenacting some imaginary argument they had in the shower that morning.

(Happy cake day, comrade!)

Would actually make their “theory” more interesting to read.

Look, I’m not going to pretend that shooting the whole family like that was pretty. Revolution is not a dinner party. But why don’t these libs get equally teary-eyed about all the people shot by Tsarist soldiers on Bloody Sunday?

Also, I don’t turn human suffering into a “look at me” photo op.

“Dude, me and my friends were so cringey in high school. That time we tried dressing like Edward Cullen because we thought it would impress girls… so dumb. Or that stupid emo phase. And don’t get me started on the all the mass murdering and war crimes we did. Bunch of dorks, that’s what we were.”

That’s the thing about armies. You kind of need people in their physical prime.

Yep, I remember when hating the prequels was pretty much the Required Thing online. Before that, Return of the Jedi (ewoks! second death star!) was the one everybody claimed was terrible. I honestly wouldn’t be suprised to see the Disney movies get rehabilitated in about ten years.

You can never have too much Juche.

Turning more overtly fascist, however, is absolutely not going to decrease the number of UwU’s.

Notice the Moscow Metro isn’t in that picture

The last time Star Wars was good was 1999

You’re telling me you didn’t like Episode II: Unstable Jedi Guy Commits Genocide to Impress Galaxy’s Most Annoying Senator and Stand-In For Lib Political Fantasies?"

What’s behind this retconning of Fidel into a lib? I see it everywhere, and it’s annoying as hell.

Also, the comic book font and those three big exclamation points are really not helping me take this exercise seriously.