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.
