Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #26

This Week in Based and Cringe...

FLEETING THOUGHTS

Well… It happened. Biden pulls the trigger on a Covid-19 vaccine mandates that impacts some 100 million workers. Merely to make a living, these people will be forced (this has gone beyond coercion) to take an experimental drug of dubious effectiveness and under reported and under studied side effects. You don’t need me to explain why this is wrong. Plenty others will have that angle covered. What I am more interested in is the unique propagandistic role that the “dirtbag left” — the post-Chapo Trap House online regime with little political power but a whole lot of ideological influence — has held in legitimizing Biden’s decisions regarding the pandemic as not just good, but – in their words: “Based.” In the Afghanistan disaster, one could already see that the dirtbag left has become but a useful counterpoint to the broader Democratic Party, while still clearly working in cahoots with their real masters (the party and its backers). Biden’s cacophonic withdrawal from the war was, for the first time in his presidency, actually criticized by the mainstream media. The dirtbags on the other hand then invented the “Based Biden” meme, positing the senile ol’ skin suit’s poorly planned disengagement as evidence of, I guess, some kind of principled anti-war stance? Last summer, however, was the opposite. The non-Bernie left liberals equated the election of Biden and Kamala with the end of racism and sexism and fascism and all the various isms that they’ve been relentlessly socially conditioned to fear. The dirtbags though, they meekly criticized Biden but said we had to vote for him to triumph over fascism. It is from these faux differences that we extrapolate the truth: controlled opposition is the most potent and effective propaganda. And, the dirtbags as the most controlled of all ops, have emerged as the regime’s most useful propagandists. So, Biden makes the jabs mandatory state measures. Are the dirtbags meekly criticizing this totalitarian state policy? Of course not! “Writer” Carl Beijer has spent the day smearing critics of the policy as “libertarians.” Berniecrat Jack Califano praises the policy as nothing less than evidence of “BASED BIDEN!” The whole thing makes you almost reverent of the lunatic petty bourgeois DNC loyalists. At least they tell us exactly what they want out of their politics. The dirtbags, however, spent four years pretending to be critical of this party as a means of securing positions within its power structure as its most useful carnival barkers. The dirtbag leftists are a truly malevolent political force, and in my Cannabis-induced paranoiac nights I quiver in humiliation that people ever associated me with them. That ain’t me!

BASED SAFETY

Anyways, sorry for that long-winded intro. As promised, here’s some cool stuff on the Internet. Philosopher Nina Power (who was kind enough to write the afterword for my debut book, Communions, which will be out September 30 from Hyperidean Press) deconstructs the role that fear has as both a historical political force and that which it holds now as the legitimizing emotional manipulation of the Covid regime. Oliver Bateman celebrates the 80th birthday of Bernard Sanders by chronicling the failed presidential candidate’s myriad achievements: decent work as the mayor of Burlington, empowering an entire new apparatus of retarded middle class leftist lifestyle influencers and propagandists, and a whole lot of fucking NOTHING. Anis Shivani writes about the series of crises in the mode of production and political economy since 9/11 that have resulted in the world we live in now (a shitty world, no doubt). Dissident rightoids over the Internet have happy boners and rage boners in equal measure over the unlikely appearance of Curtis Yarvin on Tucker Carlson’s day program, depending on their particular ideological orientations. The interview, as always with Curtis, is interesting, even if I think his notions of running the state as a “start-up” don’t exactly add up. Italian philosopher Bifo Berardi pens an essay that starts off wonderfully, with his declarations that Biden barely exists and his criticisms of the American military and its need to reproduce itself against its inevitable failures, before dipping into some over-intellectualized but stereotypical leftoid musings (still, worth a read, for sure).

Bardo Methodology re-publishes an interview with Roger Karmanik, he of death industrial pioneers Brighter Death Now and proprietor of Cold Meat Industries, and the artist discusses the freedom of bankruptcy. Mónica shows up on Justin Murphy’s show to talk about the potentialities embedded in the NFT movement as well as her own fascinating and oft-mentioned here NFT project Accursed Share. One of my good friends and absolutely favorite contemporary fiction writers Thomas Moore has a new book out, Forever, and to commemorate the occasion Thomas gets interviewed by none other than transgressive literary icon Peter Sotos for Dennis Cooper’s blog! Make art perverted again! Speaking of Dennis, the writer (with a book of his own about to drop) mounts the passing of iconic experimental musician and collaborator of his Peter Rehberg with this documentation of Rehberg’s Editions Mego label’s best records. Philippa Snow, one of the most interesting art and culture critics working today, gets me more amped than I thought was possible about Sean Durkin’s new film The Nest, starring Carrie Coons (undeniably the best thing about the occasionally interesting and occasionally absurd Damon Lindelof pseudo-surrealist series The Leftovers but has been almost ludicrously over-looked by casting directors since).

I appear on The Fedpost alongside Egg God and Hobbes and I drop knowledge about David Lynch, literature, psy-ops, and more while shamelessly my book. Check it!

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

It didn’t take me long to realize that most of the “dissident” right wingers (largely backed by various NGOs and showing up on Twitter with suspiciously huge amounts of followers well before most people even know who they are) are equally incoherent and idealistic as the DSA type leftists that the right wingers allegedly loathe are. Case in point: Pedro Gonzalez. It’s not that Pedro’s essay here is “wrong,” it’s that his framing is limited and entirely misses the point. He still seems to think that, somehow, America could get new rulers under the same political economy and achieve the kind of prosperity that flourished after World War II. They’re peddling bullshit about benevolent rulers and creating their own high-paid propaganda apparatus that ultimately seems to differ in politics little from the dirtbag leftists, save for a more pronounced anti-trans hysteria. Opportunists, we often forget, are not exclusive to the left. They are all over politics on both sides and at every level, and the more encrypted their idealism is is generally the more dangerous they can be. Keep your dicks up and third eyes open.

Judith Butler offers an interview to The Guardian and spends the entirety of it trying to square the arguments of her [shitty] book Gender Trouble with the most ludicrous and hysterical ideas coming out of gender ideological circles today. Ever the cunning regime propagandist, her philosophy is as fluid and performative as gender is in her terrible arguments. SAD! Not sure how I missed this, but the Plantation Riddler, of course still embroiled in a labor controversy over the management of his magazine, defends his dullard pacifist utopianism by examining the peaceableness and non-violence of…. Manatees. In an interview with Zero Books, Chomsky is wrong about everything. In an interview with Jacobin, Chomsky is wrong about everything.

Speaking of Jacobin, one staff writer celebrates the ability of Sally Rooney, the most insufferable false literary icon in a contemporary landscape almost unanimously full of false literary icons, to deconstruct the “limitations of the bourgeois novel,” clearly not understanding what that actually means (a disruption of linearity in narrative, not having characters of different classes). Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee attempts to take Zizek’s Taliban take to task and can’t help but revert to state department propaganda in doing so. Having a longtime soft spot for “slowcore” — bands like Codeine, Bedhead, Mercury Rev, and otherwise — I’ve been very excited to hear a new record by the genre’s most enduring geniuses Low. I grew less excited after reading this interview where the group spends the first three paragraphs unloading their Trump Derangement Syndrome. Now that, baby, is cringe.

Like I said, I have a book coming out. It is first, last, and only a work of art. I’m not a critical theorist and would hate myself if I was. All I ask, people, is that you give the work a fair share and look past my PUBLIC IMAGE when reading it.

Illustrations:
1. collage by Adam Lehrer
2. Brighter Death Now