Thursday, November 05, 2020

NY Magazine, March 3,  2019. It didn't look good then and it's aged badly.
Pinkos Have More Fun: Socialism is AOC’s calling card, Trump’s latest rhetorical bludgeon, and a new way to date in Brooklyn.
It’s the Friday after Valentine’s Day. The radical publishing house Verso Books is throwing its annual Red Party, an anti-romance-themed banger. Like a lot of the best lefty parties, it takes place in Verso’s book-lined Jay Street loft, ten stories above cobblestoned Dumbo. The view of the East River is splendid, the DJ is good, and the beers cost three bucks.

The roster tonight is heavy on extremely online political-media types. The podcaster and performer Katie Halper tells me she’s a fourth-generation socialist from the Upper West Side who used to attend a summer camp once affiliated with a communist organization called the International Workers Order. The hosts of the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House are not here, but Eli Valley, the gonzo artist who illustrated their book, is, as is Dave Klion, a ubiquitous Twitter pundit recently seen feuding with CNN’s Jake Tapper. Nearby, Sarah Leonard, who, at 30, is a veteran of the lefty-journalism orbit, tells me she’s launching a Marxist-feminist glossy called Lux, named for Rosa Luxemburg.

The guests of honor tonight are the creators of Red Yenta, a new DIY dating platform: Marissa Brostoff, 33, a grad student at CUNY, and Mindy Isser, 28, an organizer in Philly. “I was complaining about how socialist men don’t date socialist women and it really bothers me,” Isser says. Online, there wasn’t a good way to filter for someone’s politics. Sample bio: “Labor activist and aspiring historian/sci-fi writer looking for friends/open relationships. Tell me about your student debt and let’s cry together.

Election roundup.

Etc. etc.

New research on WID.world : Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising inequality and the changing structure of political conflict. In order to understand the rise of "populism", one first needs to analze the rise of "elitism". http://wid.world/news-article/new-paper-on-rising-inequality-and-the-changing-structure-of-political-conflict-wid-world-working-paper-2018-7/

Calling for the abolition of police was a romance of the youth brigade of Piketty's Brahmin Left, defending its self-image and self-interest as both enlightened and radical. Calling for abolition while defending riots and looting makes it even more absurd.

The publishers and writers for Jacobin and Current Affairs are not Jacobins; they're moderate reformers who pretend to themselves that vanguards bring revolutions rather than ride them. I mocked Robinson for playing a leftist Tom Wolfe and he took it as a compliment. I'm not going to go over all of it again. 

Again: The scolds against identitarianism are Zionists. Jilani retweets Zionists, racists and anti-Semites too:  Razib Khan, who used to write for Taki when his page was edited by Richard Spencer. Jilani writes for Haidt, another fan of race science, and editorial censorship.* He defends Zionists who lie about defending freedom of speech, but he won't mention Beinart, who was willing in his own words to sacrifice his liberalism for the Jewish State [The Atlantic has shortened the piece and removed the passage. now archive.org] but has finally come around to accepting democracy. That's too much for for Bari Weiss and therefore for Jilani, who needs to stay in the middle: the good immigrant. 

I'm still the only person I've found who's made the obvious point that the 1619 Project extended The NY Times' bad, self-serving, history of Jews and Zionism to a bad self-serving history of black Americans and racism. Buppies are a sign of progress. Buppies,  Killer Mike and Bernie Mac.
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Verso 2017

*The Haidt link is to Jonah Gelbach, on Haidt and Amy Wax. Leiter and Gelbach, in 2017.

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