this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I wouldn't call her post left, she is still miles better than Red Scare or Amy Terese and still making content that gets libs to think a little more leftward
Perhaps it's sematics, but I don't think she was ever really on the left (even in the US-centric online space) and she's spent the last couple of years entwined with the Democrats and punching left agains even mild US-soc dems. Even within an American politics online person capacity I'd argue she's already in her post-left pivot and will only go further.
"Red Scare or Amy Terese" should not be the benchmark.
I think she'll probably become a standard bearer out of touch Dem as she gets richer (a la Patton Oswalt), but will never end up like Brianna Wu trying to do anti-woke stuff for attention because she already has a huge following.
Did you not see her Vote Blue video? She spits on the left and advocating for liberal cognitive dissonance does not actually help people become communists. That's just some combination of tailism and cope.
I have not seen that but I will forever be glad she was steering some people away from stuff like Jordan Peterson at the height of "attack helicopter" transphobia and "Intellectual Dark Web" nonsense. I am sure she makes no effort to turn anyone communist, but plenty of liberals, especially in red states, who already regard Elizabeth Warren as far left, are better for having watched her.
She's a centrist encouraging people to be centrist, that doesn't seem like "getting libs to think a little more leftward" by any reasonable metric. I don't seek to contest nor do I really care about your sentimental/parasocial affection for her, but the facts are the facts.
Here's the video, by the way. The first thing I always remember about it, though it's in a tangent, is that she calls Mao a "strongman," which aside from being wrong and reeking of chauvinism, is just so fucking stupid that it's beneath even a College Republican.
As someone whose grandfather and great aunt were both professors sent to a labor camp by Mao, and whose mother grew up having to thank a portrait of Mao before dinner every evening, but still believes he did a lot of good for China, I forgive her.
Give me a break, I know a professor who was caught in the whole "reform by labor" business and they would side with me that "strongman" is a completely ridiculous thing to call Mao, even if you wrongly think that he didn't do a lot of good for China. "Strongman" doesn't mean "leader whose policies I dislike," though I'd argue Brandon does some strongman politics with his bullshit about pushups and challenging random civilians to fights when they disagree with him.
You aren't even reading my comments in their entirety before flying off (I actually said he did do a lot of good for China), and your relationship to Mao is like that of a Swiftie to Taylor Swift.
I have extended family who are officials in the CCP, who would never give a shit about Mao being called a strongman, and would not consider some US lib YouTuber a centrist for thinking that. But your criteria for "strongman" appears entirely based on the politician's personal affects rather than their actual policy, which for Mao was literally asking every household have a picture of him in it to thank, and rooting out and jailing dissidents.
Now, a lot of Mao's initiatives were a necessary course of action to end things in China like the monopolies and polygamy and foot binding, but getting mad at Contrapoints lumping Mao with other "strongmen" in some 2020 video, and equivocating her views with Biden's for it is extremely online shit, the very parasocial behavior you accuse me of, the mirror opposite of the AnCap who gets mad when someone online calls Milei a fascist because on paper he's a libertarian.
Contrapoints is basically YouTube John Oliver, I am glad if moderate libs watch her crap instead of MSNBC or Bill Maher or Sam Harris.
It's 2024. The go-to entrypoint of the liberal-to-leftist pipeline is Hasan. Contrapoints (and Breadtube in general) was okay back in like 2017 when Youtube was filled with alt-right reactionaries pushing out videos and there was a need for someone to debunk that bullshit. But since then, they haven't really adapted to the everchanging social media landscape where Youtube has been supplanted by Twitch streams and Tiktok. In a world where Tiktok gets pushed out daily, how does Hbomber or Contra releasing a video annually do anything? Their trash politics is just the cherry on top of a cake past its expiration date.
They've outlived their usefulness. They're an anachronism.
No you didn't, you left the matter ambiguous
Contra is a centrist because she supports Joe fucking Biden, and I never insinuated it was the Mao thing, though I think the chauvinism is a related issue.
Yeah, that's because strongman is in large part a rhetorical affectation, just like "populist" is. Speaking to that side, a strongman is someone who builds their image on machismo, occasionally in a very literal sense, and frames their political actions/policy as embodying that machismo. It does not mean the same thing as "dictator," which we have a dozen different words for, though the two terms are associated with each other. Mussolini was a strongman, I would argue Hitler was not (megalomaniac though he was). Putin is (and especially was) another good example of a strongman, just for reference.
If Contra called one of history's most radical democrats a dictator (and I think she also said that, but I wouldn't rewatch that stupid fucking video short of getting paid to do so), I would merely say she was an ignorant chauvinist. Calling him a "strongman" is beyond that.
[citation needed] Towards the end, those pictures certainly were there, and there were backwards officials who surely made it policy on a municipal level in some cases, but Mao didn't even want his face on the currency like it now unfortunately is. To act like he was out there going "Please clap" and telling people to use the Little Red Book like some kind of Daoist charm is, I believe, severely misunderstanding the social circumstances of the PRC's establishment.
I wish he was better at it, since we wound up with a liberal-infested hive anyway. I care much less about civil rights for fascists and capitalist roaders than I do that the children are fed.