Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #6

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY
Leila Mechoui and Alexander Davidson, whose Red Star Radio is arguably the most reliably sharp Marxist political podcast on the internet, explain why the ruling class will end the lockdowns before we achieve sufficient vaccination: “Their populations’ health and welfare are of no interest to them unless it affects working class people’s ability to work. COVID-19 never did that; ergo there is nothing to motivate capitalist states to inoculate their populations.” Artist Petra Cortright joins brother-in-arms Barrett Avner to discuss NFTs and the difficulties of being apolitical in the art world on Contain. DC Miller wonders out loud if Patsy Stevenson, the women’s rights protestor arrested last weekend in Clapham Common, is a crisis actor (as a journalist, I’ll say that the evidence as of yet is unclear, as a private citizen with a brain and a basic sense of rationale, I’ll say “yeah she absolutely is a fuckin’ crisis actor DUH!”). Queen Azealia Banks (who is aside from Kanye West, the most artistically minded at that level of fame these days) realizes she’s just too beautiful and perfect for the middling artist Ryder Ripps and breaks off their short-lived engagement. TFW NO GF director Alex Lee Moyer graces Jack and Ortant’s presence to discuss Vincent Gallo and recounts a truly mesmerizing story about hanging out with Yoko Ono. Byung-Chul Han, perhaps one of our most enduringly interesting leftwing thinkers, writes about liberalism’s complicated relationship with surveillance and the rise of the techno-feudalist state for Tank Magazine. I’m rather taken with the films of French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin and the way that she seems to reference the cinema of Genet without sacrificing a rooting in the contemporary. Tim Foyle asks, “why is it that those who question the sociopaths in power are so easily dismissed as conspiracy theorists?” Dennis Cooper has assembled a remarkable compendium of literature on one of the great works of literary art, JG Ballard’s (this site’s patron saint and namesake) Atrocity Exhibition. Our greatest film critic and an always fascinating, always hilarious writer, Nick Pinkerton, explains how the pandemic has changed how we watch films, and the films that we watch while living through the pandemic.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA
Tank Magazine is an interesting case. In the same issue, you’ll get brilliant texts by the aforementioned Han, friend Geoff Shullenberger, and philosopher Thomas Moynihan, in the same issue that they hit you with drivel like this: if nothing more than a fascinating case study in all the anarcho-liberal academic tendencies taken to their apotheosis, Juliet Jacques echoes Hilary Clinton in her dismissal of the idea that “cancel culture” exists, while also demanding that artists think of themselves as “workers” (I’m sorry Juliet, are artists producing goods or services in exchange for wages? are they exploited for surplus value? have you read a word of Karl Marx?). Speaking of Marxism, the bougie Marxist blog Cosmonaut still seems to think that Democratic Socialists of America (hard emphasis on DEMOCRAT) is somehow capable of being a vessel for worker politics, and also makes the shocking claim that the US “left” is “relatively strong” (LOL!). In a hilarious game of wokelord musical chairs, wokelord “teen magazine” for maladjusted, immature adults Teen Vogue fires its new editor before she even starts her tenure for the most mildly racialized of tweets made over a decade ago (you’ve got no one to blame but ya’ selves TV). Another week, another skullfucking article written by the lib lizard king Ezra Klein; if anyone can reduce the transcendent, exploratory qualities of psilocybin mushrooms to nothing more than a neoliberal workplace optimizing source, it’s this guy. As if there wasn’t enough censorship and propaganda to come out of the Capitol Riots, apparently we will soon need to prove ideological purity before being able to even rent a room (anyone who agrees with this kind of thing is a reactionary enemy of working people). And, christ almighty is Richard Brody a disaster or what? Somehow, the film critic who came to prominence as a scholar of Godard finds it necessary to write yet another laughably histrionic article about what to do with “problematic,” decidedly unwoke films of the past, as if that conversation hasn’t been happening on and off for 20 fucking years now! I swear to god Brody has written this same article at least a dozen times. Can one of you guys fact check that? I could use a laugh.

Until next time! Later y’all!

Illustration by Adam Lehrer