![NJR with a good point re: Houthis blockade. [Also a personal reflection on him, parasocial relations, dunking, and Hexbear]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/0e8ab287-3ea4-4210-a2bb-7d6df14a29e2.jpeg){kind=link}
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.
Why? Both of you believe Marxism is incorrect, that there's not going to be any revolution to ever worry about, that we should be polite and care about optics, that imperialism isn't a big deal really it's fine & we should do some slight reforms to capitalism to keep it stable.
You are very, very similar in all the ways that matter at this point. Perhaps you've changed, you maybe used to give a shit about something and that pissed off your fellow traveler neolibs. You could reconcile now though now that you're both nihilist capitalists.
Except I don't believe any of those things attributed to me, apart from maybe "[some of] Marxism is incorrect", which is not even a statement that I think makes sense within a Marxist perspective, and that my issues with Marxism are about methodology and epistemology, not conclusions.
you seem to have a real problem with the conclusions of "revolutionary defeatism" seeing as you openly scoff at it and feel no need whatsoever to avoid imperialism, even for widely circulated "socialist" publications
Revolutionary defeatism is only for Russians, who should know better than to support a government violating international law.
Once again, this is an issue of world views. I don't view idle criticism on a shit posting forum, or even a socialist magazine as "imperialism". Imperialism is something engaged in by state actors, not schmucks on the Internet.
Obviously an individual can defend imperialism, but criticism of US opponents isn't that. I don't have to pretend to enjoy Irans homosexuality jurisprudence to state affirmatively that we have no right or cause to interfere with their internal affairs.
Simply by virtue of being a socialist magazine Current Affairs escapes all the criticisms of imperialist media. That's pretty convenient considering this thread started with their links to The Atlantic.
You know, that's quite a few degrees of Kevin Bacon fewer between us and Current Affairs when it comes to sucking up to people like David Frum.
EDIT: wrong thread I'm literally just seeing these in all comments now lmao
Look when you can point to Current Affairs calling for sanctions or no fly zones and humanitarian bombing campaigns, I'll take anti-imperialist criticisms against them seriously.
No you won’t lmao, you take nothing seriously except yourself
No, he won't. He'll act cute and then drop "free Iran!" to try to waste more of people's time.
Alright then, let's find out. Give me the Current Affairs pro-air strikes article and we can hash it out.
Do you really expect people to listen to you explain why Current Affairs would not be prosecuted at hypothetical Maoist Nuremberg Trials of the US media class but Tucker would, and this is the bar we need to meet.
Send me the link baby
One very easy way to find out.
Do you really expect people to listen to you explain why Current Affairs would not be prosecuted at hypothetical Maoist Nuremberg Trials of the US media class but Tucker would, and this is the bar we need to meet.
Things would look a lot different if maoists were in position to do a Media Class Nuremberg trial in the US, that's for sure.
You literally expect me to listen to it.
But when Zed talks about how you're rehashing absolute trash "socialism = ressentiment" you literally type out "charlie brown adult noises"
I don't expect you to listen to it, because said article doesn't exist. You're free to call that bluff though.
And I certainly wasn't equating socialism and ressentiment anywhere.
So if you review the conversation instead of devoting all your energy to coming up with gotchas, you will discover it was a hypothetical where if you were presented with said article you would still not be a serious person. The bluff exists entirely in your head, out of your desire to own others online. We have been painstakingly explaining shit to you as if you are acting in good faith.
Current Affairs can repeat everything The Atlantic & the rest of the US media class says about North Korea without saying "WE MUST BOMB MORE OF THESE CHINESE PEOPLE" and you are satisfied they aren't imperialist media.
This is exactly what people mean when they talk about democrats getting deluded that they were radical during Bush years and never letting it go.
Am I hallucinating or were you the one who sent the moldy cheese fake reddit award?
No, but it can certainly cite The Atlantic and other sources when criticizing NK from a leftist perspective. I'm satisfied they're anti-imperialist media basd on their consistent track record of opposing Western interventions and calling out US hypocrisys when it comes to flouting of international law.
You don't get to pretend every criticism is imperialism. Or more correctly, you can, but I'm not going to take it seriously.
So once again, stop trying to contort a criticism of North Korean government into something that would fit what seemed to me to be the pretty clear criteria of advocating for Western intervention in another countries internal affairs and find an actual example of that.
The moldy cheese is not a gotcha. That is an emote dude.
Okay. Noted. Have a great night man. Glad I managed to clarify something to you. I saw you do this with the Bolsheviks committing unspeakably based acts against the Romanovs, you'll just keep going forever, patting yourself on the back.
I my defense I would have stopped if someone had convinced me it was good to shoot the kid.
G'night
not every criticism, but certainly every one parroted from the mouth of a contributing editor of The Atlantic