BASED SAFETY
I was in San Francisco last week. The city, in many ways, should be my own personal paradise. It has the exact kind of permanent October climate that I feel most relaxed, thoughtful, and settled living within. It is loaded with record stores and book stores. Its cuisine is nothing short of decadent. It is a place of obscene natural beauty. And yet, the city is a a brutal reminder of why progressive liberals simply CANNOT be allowed to rule. Riding some rented bicycles across the city early in the morning, my significant other and I ended up on several streets that looked like refugee camps. Passing what I gauged to be a methadone clinic, a woman towards the back of the line proudly wielded a boombox blasting Mobb Deep’s The Infamous (she had good taste, I’ll concede) out the speakers all while taking hits of crack cocaine. Smoking crack in line for the methadone – poetic decay. This all happens not but blocks from the country’s most obscene and extreme displays of wealth. This is how progressive liberals govern. They pass arbitrary environmental (cardboard straws ruining your iced coffee) and social control (mask mandates in outside spaces) measures implemented solely in wealthy areas to institute a hyper-managerial and efficient space of neutered life while allowing the poor to tear each other to bits. I am no idealist. I truly don’t believe (brace yourself for cringing) that anything short of worker revolution at the economic base of society could come close to rectifying these contradictions. But that said, the progressive technocrats must be stopped in the short term. They will make things much, much worse.
Alas… Writer CJ Hopkins declares the post-Covid global capitalist system to be a totalitarian menace that must be opposed. While I have previously written that we must gently nudge people out of their stupors, Hopkins advocates a much stronger approach:
"To begin with, we need to call things what they are. The ‘vaccination pass’ system is a segregation system. It is segregationism. Call it what it is. Those cooperating with it are segregationists. They’re not ‘helping’ or ‘protecting’ anybody from anything.”
No more bullshit then. Oppose the new world order loudly, often, and with blunt brutality. Mr. Hopkins, we salute you!
Sociologist Benjamin Bratton releases his Covid book Return of the Real excoriating western governments for failing to properly deal with the pandemic. But of course, Bratton totally fails to acknowledge the arbitrary social control measures that the pandemic saw implemented and writes off critiques of them as reactionary (including Agamben’s critiques, who is attacked throughout the book). Nicolas Hausdorf is having none of that. “For Bratton, every bit of disturbing information that does not fit the narrative will again be dismissed as being ‘conspiracy theory’,” writes Hausdorf. It’s not the first time that an academic has dressed up a mainstream media narrative in radical chic language, and it won’t be the last. That’s for damn sure. In a cool bit of recent global political history, Dylan Levi King chronicles the history of the influx of ketamine into China. One of my favorite writers ever, Ishmael Reed, gets a surprisingly enjoyable New Yorker profile to discuss his new play inspired by his hatred of Hamilton and also reasserts his critique of black feminist academics for their propagation of stereotypes about black men. All hail Ishmael, heroic defender of masculinity! Reed’s resurrection as a playwright gives me hope that maybe there could be a new black art divorced from liberal multiculturalism. Rejoice!
Changing pace, skateboarder Ben Kadow has a new part and it’s based. He skates sketchy, and out of control. A bit like noise music, really. But the reason I put this here is because that noise music style is emphasized by the clip’s excellent soundtrack produced by Doug Hock. This is the first time that skateboarding has been soundtracked to experimental music and marks an evolution in the form. Very cool. C. N. Naimes makes the case for an NFT driven by excess and expenditure over at Covidian Aesthetics. “If NFTs are ‘dead,’ they are only so because a shockwave follows each explosion in the eternal recurrence of life and death.” Communist Connor Kelly pulls no punches and calls it like he sees it: we are living under Covid fascism.
On a great episode of TPN, Dan Thrall shows up to connect the dots between Kenneth Anger and Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear (Robert DeNiro in that film being a dirty, macho gay icon fit for Scorpio Rising no doubt). Dean Kissick, art critic extraordinaire and overall hard to dislike cool kind of dude, goes on Contain to talk about becoming the meme “Black Dean Kissick.” Although I claimed that I could no longer support any new podcasts out of commitment to self-preservation, fuck it – stylist Walter Pearce and divine zoomer poet Honor Levy have a new podcast called Wet Brain and it’s worth listening to. Our homie Glen Rockney comes on System of Systems and celebrates the “unwoke, racist fantasia” of the brilliant American filmmaker S. Craig Zahler.
Finally, let’s pour one out for a fucking real one. Rest in peace to the great producer of experimental sound and proprietor of one of the best labels of the last 30 years in Editions Mego, Peter Rehberg. Under his own name, the alias Pita, in collaboration with Stephen O’Malley in KTL, and countless other projects, Peter disintegrated boundaries in experimental electronic music. If you want you head rocked, check out this clip of a play by French choreographer Giséle Vienne and Dennis Cooper, soundtracked by Peter and O’Malley. Here, musicians around the globe pay respect to the fallen giant. My favorite Rehberg quote: “I just think music should be a little unsafe.” A true counter-agent of the avant-garde. Rest easy.
CRINGE PROPAGANDA
The plantation riddler writes a couple thousand words about why critical race theory is awesome and should most definitely be taught in public schools. Nathan J, who has publicly advocated for ditching marxism in favor of 19th Century utopianism, is really, really relishing his role as a paid propagandist of the bourgeois state. Live it up, weirdo! Some choice quotes here: “Anti-CRT advocates should be careful, because by prohibiting theory but allowing history, they may find that the “historic oppression” of certain racial groups, if taught about accurately, uncomfortably leads to similar conclusions as CRT itself.” Um, no. Critical race theory is ahistorical as fuck. Nice try though, champ.
The aforementioned Bratton previews his book at the Verso blog to snipe some more at Agamben, whose implicit suspicion of reactionary state measures implemented during a MANUFACTURED CRISIS makes him, according to Bratton, an Alex Jones of philosophy. This is both incredibly rude and derogatory, because Alex is not a philosopher of global renown, but also quite complimentary in a certain light, because Alex is a HOT BLOODED American man, a WARRIOR poet and AN ARTIST, baby! Bratton outlines more of his ideas here at the New Models podcast, which seems to be attempting to platform every single left accelerationist utopian geek the world has to offer, and also here.
Speaking of utopian left accelerationist geek nonsense, Leigh Phillips argues for socialists to fight for science and technology divorced from the profit motive. Newsflash nerd: science and technology will NEVER be a tool in class struggle and will ALWAYS be used by the bourgeoise as tools to punish, silence, and shame the working class. The art world is not without its bountiful techno utopians either, as evidenced by this piece of snitch advocacy by artist Joshua Citarella. Leading the revolution one Guardian article at a time. Though I don’t care enough about sports to feel one way or the other about gymnast/quitter Simone Biles, Jacobin’s take on the situation is predictably hilarious: Biles’s decision to leave her squad high and dry and quit the Olympics due to “mental illness” because, Aaron Freedman says, she’s “a worker.” Agh, yes. Who can forget the chapter of Das Kapital in which Marx theorizes the bourgeoise as those who give Nike endorsements and the proletariat as those who take Nike endorsements. Brilliant stuff! Andrew Marantz looks at what he’s decided to call “the Post-Dirtbag Left,” which apparently is being led by snitch, Koch Brothers-funded wimp Alexander Reid Ross, who has previously spent the last year calling dirtbag leftists fascists. But is this not the logical conclusion of such a meek, fraudulent political formation? Is this not the endgame to any grouping of media hacks who prioritize branding over realpolitik? It is what it is, baby. It is what it is.
If you’re curious how an allegedly smart anarchist thinks, check out this video. No, it’s not pretty. Speaking of not pretty, NAMBLA leftism is out in full force this week. In this article, the NY Times all but advocates for prostitution amongst transgender teenagers. The article opens with an anecdote about a 13-year-old transgender girl being disowned by her family and “taken in” and “shown the ropes” of selling her sex by a group of adult transgender women. Excuse me, but what do we usually call it when adults teach children how to both have and sell sex? Yeah, that’s pedophilia and trafficking. Oddly enough, Brace Belden of TrueAnon pointed this out, and was ratio’d. Therein lies the difficulty of cultivating a huge audience of hysteric leftists. Finally, trad-Cath larper Liz Bruenig has a grand idea for combating the excesses of the porn industry. In the most leftist of leftist arguments ever, she asks “could teenagers benefit from a new class of porn managers monitoring the porn on the web?” I don’t know. I don’t know how that would be implemented. But why is it that every leftist solution to every social problem results in new jobs for over-educated leftists? Seems…… deliberate.
That’s it. I feel cold on the inside. I hope I find my soul as I go home.
Illustration by Darick Robertson
This is great, thanks again, Adam. All hail CJ Hopkins and down with Bratton: there will be an in-depth discussion of Bratton‘s leftwing totalitarian fantasies in an upcoming ep of Red Star Radio. Especially after Bratton called me a „libertarian Trotskyist“, an „anti-vaxxer Marxist“, and „sociopathic crackpot“ (I liked this one) on Twitter, unprovoked, you could see that the very fragile Mr Bratton isn’t really up for having a critical discussion of his theses, symptomatic for the authoritarian stream he represents.
Check out my new Substack on the left’s inversion of conspiracy and reality and another authoritarianism fanboy, Quinn Slobodian, which I think I‘ll manage to upload today. Much love and keep on resisting, E
i live about a mile away from current affairs headquarters on st charles avenue and I keep hoping i will catch the "plantation riddler" staring at the clouds so i can mug him for the cause