On Nathan J. Robinson. I learnt yesterday that he didn’t do any union-busting, and the departing writers/editors who stirred up so much drama on left-Twitter were lying all along. This article by Yasmin Nair gives the full breakdown with a lot of receipts.
I was linked this article by @HarryLime@hexbear.net in his post yesterday, where NJR was vindicated on calling out Fetterman being terrible back in 2022. The replies to that tweet are filled with people dunking on Nathan, while the quote tweets, almost all from the past couple days, are filled with everyone apologizing.
It’s pretty interesting to see.
I’m currently going through his other tweets. So far, NJR seems like a pretty decent guy with a lot of good analysis', completely different from the caricature I made up in my mind from memes and tweets.
It’s quite strange. I used to read Current Affairs before the “incident” and even listened to the podcast. I liked everyone there, including Nathan. I guess that’s why when I heard what happened, and saw in real time all the people I liked fighting with each other (well, all the people I recognised from the articles and the podcast dunking Nathan), I felt betrayed in a sense. I remember writing an email or filling out a form or something similar that the writers who’d been “fired” had set up. Maybe I donated money too, but I don’t remember that. If I did, it would be a small amount.
And I stopped my subscription to Current Affairs, changing it to Jacobin instead.
There was a lot of trolling that went on. I don’t think I ever tweeted at him personally, but that doesn’t matter. I know I consumed the tweets and posts (even here and on the subreddit back when it existed!)
Why? For me, I guess, it was a sense of justice mixed with betrayal: here was a man who headed an org I respected who had betrayed these principals we all hold dear, and in doing so hurt these other people who I also like. And the only power I have in enacting “justice” is in ridiculing him a little bit.
But even then, that never achieved anything. I won’t say “dunking” as a whole is useless. It can be useful in bringing people together and giving us a sense of camaraderie, but only when it’s against deserving subjects - billionaires and the like. It’s like part of forming an identity around common things we hate.
But… completely divorced from any other forms of unification, any other ways to group and coalesce, all that left is a weak identity that does nothing but dunk for no other purpose. Thats, I guess, what happened to me.
None of us here became leftists for the purpose of trolling others. Using it to hurt and bully others is what people on the right do, even if they consider themselves apolitical sometimes.
But dunking on Nathan…became that. Didn’t it? In the article, Yasmin Nair points to real world examples of people bullying him. I imagine they did so out of a similar feeling of “betrayal”, and sought “justice” too. But how would that achieve it? It wouldn’t. It can’t.
This happened because we separated our actual politics - leftism - from our online activities. Maybe not all of us, but I’d wage at least quite a few. If Current Affairs had failed in the years between the Incident and the start of Jan, 2024, I would’ve thought “sad this happened, but serves him right” with no thought to the actual damage that would’ve done to the real world impacts of losing a magazine like that to left politics.
That’s a failing on my part. It’s a failing that I let my personal grievances with Nathan (Ill-informed as I now know) shut me off completely from Current Affairs as a whole, with all the great writers who work and publish there, then and now.
I remember there was an effort, early on in this site’s history, of making this place more than just a place to shitpost online - to actually be used to organise. It failed, partly because we were small and partly because we were too resistant. There were also onboarding efforts to allow us to grow to mitigate that first problem, but it ran into the second one, our resistance to change, and, well, here we are today. Is there anyone here who remembers those days? What a mess. Since then, a lot of original people who created and did the heavy lifting of maintaining this site, including creatively, left.
I remember enquiring sometime ago, maybe 2022, maybe 2023, about what happened to the writers who left Current Affairs. Have they found other jobs? Where are they working, publishing, podcasting? I wanted to support them. I didn’t figure it out. Some have now deleted their Twitter, others have privated their accounts. Maybe it’s for the best.
Maybe things could’ve been different if we could’ve grown and changed and been the place for atleast left-adjacent people to come by the time Reddit exploded and people started to migrate to Lemmy. Who knows? That’s a different world, and probably also a different post. But at least we could learn something from our mistakes. I am trying to from mine. —
This went in directions I wasn’t expecting. I just typed out my thoughts as they came to me. You don’t really have to read it.
TLDR: “I’m sorry, Nathan” and maybe dunking, without any thing else, is not good.
No we're talking about people mimicking posh aristocratic culture lmfao you don't get to turn this into homophobia
The problem with aristocrats isn't that they drop their r's or wear cravats, so who cares if NJR wants to dress as a caricature of one? He's not making us look any more ridiculous than the people posting arcane drilbits on twitter in the Chris Hayes mentions.
Well maybe I missed that being the crux of this thread, because it sure looks a whole lot like people directly quoting him and the claims against him. There was passing mention of the outfits. I have been defending NJR's takes for actually BEING BETTER THAN SOME OF THE "PRO-PALESTINE PEOPLE" WHO RUN WITH THE "HOUTHI PIRATES" NARRATIVE BUT ADD "IT'S GOOD ACTUALLY" I don't care about the cravat. He also sucks and is a socdem and the twitter people who like him severely overestimate how funny they are.
I care about you thinking people wanting to kill their boss is creepy. It's a sign you have several senses and breathe oxygen, in most cases, like food service. Especially if you have a slappable ass like I do!
That is creepy. Hating your boss isn't creepy. Working for a system where they aren't in a position to make your life miserable constantly isn't creepy. But if immediately jumping to "this sucks, wish I could kill him" and harboring consistent, violent thoughts directed at another person isn't creepy, what exactly is creepy supposed to mean?
I've got bad news for you about the revolution.
You are just repeating conservative/Nietzchean critiques of socialism as "Ressentiment" that have been used against socialists for hundreds of years.
Guess what, actual real revolutionaries that seize power around the world are children of desperation who ARE fulfilling their revenge fantasy and that's GOOD. Infinite revenge on the western world. The Yemenis and North Koreans are constantly fantasizing about killing American troops, and that's what makes them the best people on Earth. Your lack of anger is an indictment of you, the underclasses of the world have legitimate anger and will only prevail when they embrace it fully as a class.
I fall asleep every night thinking warm thoughts how to best fuck up and sabotage this imperialist monster. That's the energy we need in everyone.
You are obsessed with bourgeois optics, you've internalized them when you think violent revolution is "creepy"
TALK TO EM
Ressentiment is good, and it is my friend. Kill the masters. Drink their fucking blood.
That'll show'em!
I recommend reading Lukács.
Seriously?
I'm certainly not going to take a guy laundering his revenge fantasies through movements he's never interacted with and has no insight into beyond their public pronouncements seriously. Hamas has video of there fighters saying "we will not harm civilians, it is un-Islamic to do so" yet this guy is repeating Zionist taking points about them thirsting for settler blood.
You have been commended! @voight@hexbear.net sent you the Club Penguin Stinky Cheese Award. +300 Lems have been added to your account.
Bro thought when they said "we hate the government, not the people" they meant "we don't hate the troops who kill us"
Dude, do you think that American troops are all smol beans who joined because they need free healthcare or something? Peep the liberal realist substack. https://adamtooze.com/2023/07/25/chartbook-229/
Just reposting this to emphasize what you managed to twist into "ugh, leftists just want to kill whitey"
Look I'm not the one pretending the Yemen and NK soldiers are bloodlusting subhumans who constantly think about killing American soldiers. They're normal people with normal, mundane existences and fantasies and would love to get on with their lives and pay the US absolutely zero mind if we didn't constantly fuck them over.
You are pretending that's what those words mean, it makes the way you misunderstand the words of the people you're trying to defend yourself with even more disgusting.
Here's a question: how many North Korean soldiers should one talk to before authoritatively pontificating about their constant violent fantasies?
Come on it's the one thing ignorant westerners know about DPRK that's actually correct: That the whole population is "indoctrinated" (I would said, educated by their specific history) since birth to hate America, their society is hyper-focused around the Korean War and never allowing such a situation to happen again. Hence the nukes and militarization. That's entirely correct, the vast majority of the population hates America with all their heart. DPRK foreign policy is basically entirely anti-American at every turn just to spite them, and it makes them the most based nation in terms of their statements and actions (Yemen is giving them a run for their money lately).
Bro is authoritatively pontificating
You: Yemeni are just mundane boring people
Actual Yemenis, in the millions in the streets: We don't care, we don't care. Bring on the great World War. Finally a chance to directly fight the great Satan. We will eradicate the Zionists, their American backers and stop the genocide in Gaza or die trying. Praise Allah.
this dude pisses me off lmao, but there is slight truth to this. I loved Game of Thrones when I was a kid and I was in the region, my uncle brought me a copy of it in English when I was 13 or 14 and it helped me learn it. Saying that westerners and non-westerners have the same subjectivity is incorrect though. Being colonized vs. colonizer changes ones entire outlook. As seen here with Blanqui.
He totally has a point about the pop culture stuff, but it gets taken to absurd heights, especially considering how voices from any region other than 14 eyes countries are treated on social media
oh damn 5 eyes have upgraded?
I'm just gonna assume literally every country on the Mullvad server list is playing ball.
Do you hear the cry from all over the world? "Please, make this stop somehow, but don't treat the volunteer air force too harshly with your words."
No, but I also don't hear "get him,he's wearing a cravat".
Do you have a retirement fund? Would you like me to tell you what it does, so you can interpret what I'm saying as a call for your body to be mulched and sent to Argentina to fertilize grapefruit orchards?
Do they grow grapefruit in Argentina? Seems a bit temperate for that.
What is creepy is turning the chair around and engaging in this concern trolling because you saw people make adventurist comments. Talking like "my fellow leftists, we have a problem with guillotine jokes. stop making fun of people who wear bow ties" and then explaining you mean tucker carlson when someone is like "what"
If you've never heard anyone talk like that and think it's a sign of being a serial killer who harbors actual plans of killing their boss, I can reassure you it is quite common.
Joking about pushing the boss into the trash compactor is in fact funny even if it misses the forest for the trees. (Forest being upper management & finance, etcetera.)
You do know the humor in the joke only works when everyone is on the same page about no one actually wanting to push them into the trash compactor? Obviously occasionally joking about killing your boss isn't creepy. Actually wanting to kill your boss is creepy.
If I joke about wanting to jump in traffic to get out of a meeting, it's funny because everyone knows I don't actually want to jump in traffic. If I tell my coworker about wanting to go jump in traffic and they think I mean it, it's somewhat less funny.
Yes, that's why I'm recommending you get on the same page.
Very glad we still have folks here who understand how ordinary people would react to some of the stuff we post.
For some reason I'm reminded of us pointing and laughing at Israel for being so up their own asses they don't realize how they're creeping out everyone who doesn't already agree with them.
I mean, on here I don't really care; it's for internal consumption. In my massive struggle session about how Killing Alexei Romanov was not justified, I got off some zingers about the execution. It's fine, we're all mostly on the same page here.
The point I'm getting at in this thread is there are plenty of people who wont' hesitate to make fun of NJR for "making leftists look ridiculous" while posting "Daddy Xi pls nuke us all" from a twitter account with a
profile picture.
I agree with basically everything, but I don't know why we all think a public forum is our exclusive hidden clubhouse, or if it was, why that would matter if someone wanted to write/post somewhere else about "look at how crazy the left is."