Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #23

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY

Don’t let rats into your group chat, that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Academic Yasmina Price writes about filmmaker Bill Gunn, a retrospective of whom is currently showing at Artists Space, and is actually honest and clear about Gunn’s contempt for political art and his refusal to be reduced to an “activist artist,” much to the detriment of his own success. “Rather than marshal film toward pedagogic or moralizing ends, Gunn was drawn to its potential to execute exacting aesthetic visions,” writes Price. DC Miller historicizes Cecil Rhodes, who served as the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, and it functions as a case study in how liberal idealism collapses into imperialism. Paleocon historian Paul Gottfried derides the right and commentators like Mark Levin for chalking up progressive liberal hegemony to “marxism,” pointing out the obvious fact that it’s unlikely Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook want to abolish the political economic system that they are a part of. Rightoids: if you want to fight this, you have to do better than this. You can’t oppose a machine when you don’t know how that machine operates. I don’t care, either way, I don’t think any of these theories or ideas will push us mast this totalizing force. Just some advice.

The science-fiction writer Mark von Schlegell remembers his friend, the late Los Angeles-based artist Julie Becker, and shares specific insight into the artist’s talent for collecting the ephemera of a chaotic popular culture: “One of a generation of life-long fans, collectors, consumers of marginal, failed, experimental, or seditious popular-culture escape fantasies (music, cinema, books, TV), she knew how to archive, preserve, record, and collect against the flow of entropy.” In this essay, conceptual photographer Jeff Wall uses a Leninist framework to elucidate the tension between canonical art forms (like painting) with newer ones. Honor and Walter are off to the rafters with their new podcast Wet Brain; its third episode here features philosopher Nina Power who briefly discusses her new book, and Tao Lin, whose new novel Leave Society was published yesterday. I started reading it yesterday, and I must declare it as Tao’s best work, easily. There is less of the muted vice signaling and existential meaninglessness of earlier works like Taipei and a renewed focus on spirituality and beauty. Read an excerpt here.

Nicholas Hausdorf appears on Contain for some more Bratton bashing, following his brutal critique of Bratton’s new book last week for im1776. My gay homies Jack and the filthiest Armenian around fan girl out on The Fountainhead. Black metal magazine Bardo Methodology interviews Wulvaricht, co-author of one of the greatest works of true crime ever in Manhunter. The book chronicles the bizarre and surreal history of Swedish murderer Sigvard Thurneman. The book intersects with the occult, and we’re down with that shit at Safety Propaganda. You already know what the fuck it is.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Some cultural critics/MI6 functionaries/shitlibs/”friends” of Mark Fisher (Simon Reynolds, Anwen Crawford, etc) get together to commemorate Fisher’s K-Punk blog and the blogosphere moment of the early 2000s while saying a bunch of utterly retarded things. Some real doozy moments include Reynolds expressing his disdain for Fisher’s baiting of feminists in the Exiting the Vampire’s Castle essay and Anwen calling Nina Power a member of the alt-right. Insidious people, they are. Sad, because Reynolds’ music criticism was indispensable for a long time, but how can you really neutrally read something that we know now is so laden in false consciousness?

The Covid totalitarian state is all but official with the announcement of a partnership between Paypal and the ADL who will now monitor the financial activity of those suspected of “political extremist ideologies,” yeah that won’t be abused or anything you fucking idiots. This essay by El Jones warns about “the neoliberal co-optation of Black Lives Matter,” getting just about everything wrong in its attempts to critique BLM’s corporate ties while pretending that those ties aren’t baked into its very neoliberal foundation. Adolph Reed, Jr. pens this in response, and I don’t disagree with anything that he says in it because it’s basically all right. But as per usual, Reed’s essay would have been much more useful about 16 months ago, when the rest of us were saying the same things and losing our platforms over it. Nevertheless, Adolph is right: capitalism can’t recuperate something that was always flattering to capitalism’s interests in the first place. Adolph and Walter Benn Michaels (who seems to also have done himself the solid and hidden from the discourse for the last year) talk more about this here. It’s officially safe to call Black Lives Matter bullshit, now that the DNC has already maximized the use value of the movement itself. FUCKING TYPICAL!

Neolibtard gallery Serpentine announces some neolibtard social justice grants, convenient timing given the small controversy that erupted over the gallery’s continued association with the opioid pushing Sackler family. Natasha Lennard, as per usual, has a whole lot of nothing to say about the Cuomo scandal. Whenever a writer at The Intercept wants to sound smart they just say something like: “It’s the system.” Make them define the system or patriarchal system or whatever and they fall apart, every time. In another ridiculous essay by Charles Blow, the CIA agent celebrates the resurgence of policy-based protests, going as far as to call elected members of congress like Beto O’Rourke and Cori Bush “activists.” Unreal. Luke Savage lets the cope begin in response to Nina Turner’s congressional loss in Ohio. I one hundred percent don’t believe the party conspired against Turner (and even if they did, that never stops from leftists voting for the people who fuck over their favorites). The Squad has already proven to be much more useful propagandistically to the party’s interests than effective in enacting any policy that the party doesn’t want. But sure, go ahead leftists. Keep spending money and energy on these campaigns. Maybe if you elect just a couple more race hucksters to congress then America will change! Keep that same failed strategy on loop! Don’t learn from your mistakes! Let’s go!

Keep it moving my faithful flock. Enjoy yourselves and do the Mussolini!

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Adam Lehrer
2. Will Boone