Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #11

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY
Doctor-assisted suicide….. It’s a tough one. From one perspective, I think Jack Kevorkian thought he was on the side of humanity; I think he was a man of integrity. However, I simply cannot support giving a bourgeois state the power to kill the sick. Any alleged marxist that can’t understand how easily that power could be abused is a bourgeois moron (it’s the perfect cover for the state to fulfill the bleakest prophecies of the most prophetic recent leftwing philosopher Zygmunt Bauman). Beyond my hopelessly marxoided opposition to the policy, however, my favorite still prominent literary artist, Michel Houellebecq, beautifully posits the case against doctor-assisted suicide as a moral issue and positions its wide support amongst the French as the death of the country’s dignity. Brother-in-arms Angelicism01 corrects the record on NFTs, jabs at the post-Internet artists that have embraced them, and has a laugh at the expense of the art critics who can’t wrap their heads around them. As loathe as I am to have anything by The NY Times in the “Based Safety” section of this column, I did really love this piece by Rob Tannenbaum on the new posthumous album by Suicide’s fallen frontman Alan Vega. Mutator is a series of tracks made by Vega and his wife Liz Lamere in the ‘90s and is the most fantastic piece of music I’ve heard by Vega since his collaborations with Pan Sonic in the 1990s; Vega’s romantic psychobilly vocals are enveloped in surreal and hauntological washes of industrial electronic sound.

Swiss black metal geniuses Paysage d’Hiver have a new album called called Geister; it’s a bit more accessible than their music of the past but still beautiful, surreal, and transcendentally bleak. I’m so Popular host and based drag queen extraordinaire Zach Langley joins Barrett at Contain, and Zach and I both go on The Perfume Nationalist to discuss Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and Verhoeven’s Elle. Sabrina Tarasoff, the rare young art critic who seems to actually care about art and ideas more than signaling virtue and retard politics, writes about the evocative and uncanny English sculptor Beth Collar for Mousse Magazine (she cites and quotes Blanchot, who some will recognize as a most formative influence on the literary cringe that is Safety Propaganda). Jordan Peterson does indeed have boring boomer lib politics, but anyone who can watch his interview with Russell Brand (a celebrity with a near stunning understanding of politics and an even more impressive integrity) and not feel themself tearing up is unquestionably dead inside. Seriously, your insides are cold, what’s wrong with you?

Platypus figurehead Chris Cutrone, probably the most consistently based and interesting American communist, absolutely schools cryto-radlib and Zero Books publisher Doug Lain on a dictatorship of the proletariat and the evils of progressive capitalism/wokeness, and tells him straight up: the Marxist anti-left critique is correct (though I wouldn’t suggest you sign up for Doug’s paypig page, the paywalled content is also great: Chris tells Doug that Trump is a virtuous bourgeois leader). The Breathing Problems Productions podcast hosts Zach Fogle of Basic Torture Procedure (etc.) to talk about the pleasures of gorenoise. Michael Tracey, indefatigable, points out the absurd singularity in the media and corporate America’s responses to the Chauvin verdict. And though I hate to include anything by The Quietus here (considering its editors fired me and one of those editors suggested that I was “no better than Hitler with a better record collection), I can’t deny the pleasures I experienced reading this excerpt from John “Drumbo” French’s memoir about recording one of my favorite albums of all time, Trout Mask Replica, with my musical hero Captain Beefheart.

On System of Systems, we chat with Lewis Parker about his publishing company Morbid Books and literature more broadly.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Guernica Magazine — one of the most consistently fucktarded “intellectual” magazines in the world — almost runs out of things that need to be called racist and “decolonized” and then, VOILA! Grégory Pierrot has them covered with this just utterly brilliant deconstruction of the powerful political force of white supremacism that is “hipsterdom” (hipsterdom is fake and so is decolonial theory, Baudrillard as fuck, baby!). The Times is kicking up some new climate hysteria and demands we LISTEN TO AUTIST GRETA! I guess we can expect climate lockdowns within the next 10 years or less… More climate change hysteria here: shitlib music “critic” Jayson Greene asks: “What can music do to prevent climate change?” Of course if Jayson was honest he would have written this article in a single word: NOTHING.

I have little affinity for Andrew Yang or his psyop techno-feudal politics, but does anyone really believe he hates women or has a women problem? He seems like one of the few American political figures who might actually be a nice, normalish man. Well, The Daily Beast really wants you to think that he has a women problem, so it’s safe to assume someone in New York’s elite really hates Asian men, right? That’s how it works right? According to these retards? Anyways…

Bourgeois leftoid fuckwit Matt McManus lets the bourgeois leftoid fuckwit audience of Jacobin know: democratic socialism MUST be international? Um, global state capitalism? That makes not one lick of fucking sense. International and communism, sure, but how could we enforce a global state capitalism? Through colonialism and imperialism of course! That’s what these people want, by the way: woke imperialism is alive and well! A dumb writer for VICE (as if there’s a different kind of VICE writer) doesn’t want to go back to work but is looking forward to the snacks (that’s it, that’s the whole bit). Also, apparently it’s “National Rape Day?” What the fuck is wrong with this world? Finally, in a surreal self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, the biographer of the most gloriously horny American writer post-Henry Miller, Phillip Roth, has been accused of sexual assault. Inexplicably, the book (which is quite good) has already been shelved before any investigation, let alone trial. Bourgeois freedom erodes and erodes ever more.

Later everyone! Stop wearing masks!

Illustration by Adam Lehrer