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He was such a great villain… just really spectacular! His long-term feud with the great Ricky Steamboat was the stuff of fucking legend… warning for fake wrasslin’ violence…
Wrasslin’ is of course fake, but you really got to admire the athleticism at play there…
Sorry… didn’t mean to take this way off topic! My apologies everyone!
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I just ran across this and this outlet (Sublation media)… it might be some dirt-bag left stuff, but we’ll see. I’m listening to this now…
Welp, he just called “identity politics” the “so-called Left”, so I’m not hopeful… too bad, I think Finkelstein has done some great work Israel-Palestine. But I’ll keep listening…
He just accused Obama of running solely on race.
I remember him endless running away from the questions of race, actually.
[ETA] He just “both sides” the culture wars… 
[ETA] “don’t talk to us about workers, we want minorities, and kinky sexual minorities”
Way to dismiss violent suppression of anyone who isn’t a white dude… everyone knows that they don’t work… /s
So far, this isn’t very interesting or thoughtful - just full on “dirtbag left” BS about what the working class is, and how multiple issues intersect and overlap. It’s really fucking disappointing how easily some very smart people are convinced to attack people who are very much suffering and are a part of the working class.
[ETA] And now Barack Obama made much of his life story up, apparently? 
[ETA] This just popped up on the screen?
“Capital isn’t right wing”?
[ETA] Another…
Tell that the Tyre Nichols (oh wait, you can’t) or to the trans community in Texas or women who can’t get abortions?
[ETA] “He [Bernie Sanders] could probably have won over about 25% of Trumps base”
Trumps base is the ultimate outcome of right wing culture wars/ white identity politics. You think they’re going to vote for a Jewish candidate for president?
[ETA] The lady in the video just said that the reason why Jeremy Corbyn lost was that he did not have the working class behind him, because he “introduced himself with pronouns”? None of these people know what the working class ACTUALLY is, do they?
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Thank you for listening to it, so that I will never have to
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It’s sadly not worth it. He seems to have gone in the same directly as Greenwald - which is fucked up given what happened to him with tenure a while ago.
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He is now contradicting himself about what brought Corbyn down - he claimed a conspiracy by the elite in Britain (which I’d agree with) to paint him as an anti-semite. And now he did himself in because he proved to be a weak candidate who waffled… “he just kept on conceding and conceding and conceding”…
Funny he can’t entertain that him “introducing himself with his pronouns” might have also been as much of a problem as him having working class support…
It also strikes me that he’s ignoring how the right wing employs a fake appeal to the working classes in their brand of identity politics (ie, white men only, whatever their actual class status)…
On a different topic - “Covid just came out of the blue” - if you ignore the people who had been warning about a global pandemic, and the “race-obsessed” Obama who did nothing of value who managed several pandemics during his term, and left Trump a god damn play book, which they threw the fuck out in their racist attempt to undo anything Obama did…
And now the woman is ignoring the identity politics employed by Trump…
“I don’t like to employ the term fascist, because I think it’s devoid of any class content” “It means something very specific in the 1930s when it emerged” (ignoring that it emerged in the 1920s).
“The Republican party is more working class then the Democratic party in many respects.”
I see someone has been reading David Brooks stupid analysis of the Trump GOP… which is full on BS…
[ETA] He has a good analysis going about the hollowing out of the MC in America, and how probably 80% of the country is despondant. Can’t disagree there. He goes on to note that as a kid, working a 40 hour week meant that you could support a family, buy a house, etc… He fails to mention who were largely left out of that prosperity - who could be killed for being in teh wrong place at the wrong time, who could lose their job for who they love, or for their gender… how it was mostly white men (though at this time, at least some who weren’t protestant were getting new opportunities, as long as they were white, and did not seem “too ethnic” in their public personas). It was not Black Americans, or other POCs, or the LGBQT+ people pushing for greater rights that ended it - it was a reactionary right wing playing white identity politics that brought that shit to the end. The dismantling of the liberal consensus started with a racist strategy to appeal to the “white working class”!!! FFS!!!
He also just called the current generation an usual generation, when the reality is that the boomers were the unusual generation, not the rest of us, before or since. It’s irritating to see someone who is supposed to be educated on the history of politics doesn’t know just how unusually the boomers were.
Now he’s saying that Ron Desantis is the doppleganger of Pete Buttigeg?
Biden’s a corpse, apparently?
Now they’re talking about a world war being floated, and how if we go to war with China, we could be bombed… And what about the people already here, already suffering from state-backed or right wing violence? I guess since they trade in “identity politics” they’re really under threat, just like they’re not really working class… /s
I certainly don’t disagree that the media is trying to ramp up a conflict. Far too much of the media is playing the “yellow journalism” card, no doubt. Because it’s corporate controlled.
Uh… Ukraine’s coming up… 
[ETA] He’s claiming that the minority of people who came to fight in Ukraine, who are undoubtably right wing, are the real threat of a nuclear accident, because they “have control” of (apparently) ALL the weapons we’ve sent to Ukraine (ignoring how the Russian Army targeted Chernobyl in their initial invasion)… He’s saying the army is dominated by the right wing, but trying to give himself an out…
[ETA] It’s over… sorry to waste anyone’s time. I think he made a couple of good points, about problems within the Democratic (and labour) party, as well as about global politics at times, but you don’t fix shit by ignoring a subset of the problems, and placing the blame in the wrong place. All you get is more of the same shit, and alienating people who could be working together. His tone with just dismissive and condescending to anyone who isn’t part of what HE deems the working class. It’s a wider and more complicated category then he seems to believe. Really disappointing.
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Indeed, thanks for the summary. He used to be great on Israel/Palestine, and it sucked to see him denied tenure for that (just as Steven Saleita was denied a professor position for it). Sad that he’s become so politically myopic.
It does sound, though, like your comparison to Greenwald is unfair? He doesn’t sound like he’s basically a far-right wingnut now, as Greenwald seems to be.
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Indeed!
Maybe so, but I’d guess he is probably more sympathetic and could easily fall into that pattern, given the direction his analysis has moved.
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I was hoping you’d write that he was critical of how a cynical foregrounding of identity issues can obscure class issues, allowing class division/oppression to proceed unimpeded – as in Cornel West’s critique of merely putting “black faces in high places” and thinking that’s enough to appease the left.
But no, NF sounds like he sees no reason at all to think and work in “intersectional” ways.
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Yeah, that’s clearly not where he’s at… or if he thinks that’s where he’s at, that’s not how he expressed it. It felt like a wholesale dismissal of any kind of “identity” politics, and just the blanket assumption that the working class is primarily made up of white men.
One thing I was struck by was that he started out saying he felt the need to explore the intellectual underpinnings of identity politics, but very much just dismissed the whole genre out of hand, despite the fact that quite a bit of it works to be intersectional with economic class…
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Real issues are the ones that affect me. Or might possibly do so; but probably don’t in his case.
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I can understand why this model would appeal to some employees. Still, it leaves me wondering about cases where it still benefits corporations far more than workers (see link below the video for more on that):
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It strikes me that this is more of the kind of thinking we need if we want to build a more sustainable, equitable world. Thinking more creatively about all sorts of topics, including how we die and what happens with our remains…
Oh, and there’s an Ask a Mortician video about getting the NY state bill on human composting passed and the conservative reaction to it:
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I for one welcome the idea of tossing the corpse of Fux News in a compost bin.
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Oh, nicely put.
I need a reference, please, to a sympathetically written analysis on that point, one approachable by a bright high school student who is tiring of identity issue matters to the point of wishing a pox on all respective houses.
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These might be of some use to you.
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