Semi off the cuff observations on a terrible television spectacle.
Punishment Park
Watched a few minutes of Milo Yiannoupolis on the Bill Maher Islamophobia hour aka, "Dead Time with Bill Maher." It was as bad as you would imagine. Milo made comments that he wished Maher would bring on guests with "higher IQs" immediately playing his nineteenth century eugenics angle on social shit talking. There was one bright spot when Larry Wilmore told Milo to "go fuck yourself" and then called out his statistical claim about alleged transexual propensity to criminality, as unfounded BS. Wilmore rightly categorized Milo’s transphobic claims, that he wanted to protect “women and girls” from sick men who think they are women in public bathrooms, as the same type of collective diagnosis that gays used to get when they were categorized as mental deviants driven to fuck everything in sight. Milo came off as an incoherent little phony trying to skim by, unsuccessfully judging by the audience's silence after his statements, on television charm and spectacle.
The whole show (what I could stomach of it) was a spectacle in the deepest Situationist sense of the term. At one point Bill Maher scolded Milo, only to beg him to shape up into the "young Christopher Hitchens" he might become. Milo as contrarian guardian of free speech and liberty, and Maher as protector of women and secular thought against Islamic fascism are as convincing as Hitchen’s claim to the mantle of the last Enlightenment liberal, cloaked in the infallible ectoplasm of George Orwell’s ghost, as he cheered white phosphorous over Fallujah: “The death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped.”
Then Bill defended a guest, veteran Malcolm Nance, a counter terror expert and big supporter of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Nance is also known as a critic of water boarding and torture, presumably because such dishonorable actions discredit the otherwise righteous wars of aggression carried out by the US ruling class and their capitalist allies. Maher affectionately slapped Yiannopoulos on the back, chiding "Milo, he's done stuff that ALLOWS YOU TO BE ALIVE!" Audience applause. That old familiar canard that only the violence of the state allows us our freedom. Imagine the horrors of a USA with no CIA sponsored overthrows of democratically elected governments, no standing army and police force to beat and shoot strikers and protesters, no borders and deportations, and no capitalist class of "risk takers" and "job creators" to act as the life blood of the community/nation state and start the wars we so desperately need to maintain our freedom to work for them at home. Wilmore similarly held the man up as an exemplary intellectual, presumably against the condescension of Milo toward black people, proving again that American liberalism is committed to a multicultural ruling class and pro-state intelligentsia. There was much unity among the host and all the guests that US nationalism is beyond question a force for good.
Former Georgia congressman Jack Kingston, now an adviser to Trump told Milo "We are all about the first amendment here and Milo, go for it brother because I think what they did to you at Berkeley was atrocious." And then he hugged Larry.
I forwarded a bit through the online clip to where Milo was once again noting that "the Stormfronters hate me!!!" as if this was evidence that he is in no way a fascist. Here we have another in a long line of members of what should be called the "[I'm Not A] Nazi Party" including Michael Moynihan, and a new crop of "alt-Right" Volk-nuts.
The false spectacular opposition. Separation and unity in the spectacle. We the workers are separated from any real critique of this horrible violent system, instead having the faux "free speech" wings of right and left each standing up for us. Maher mediated a compromise position, our right to demand more violence and alienation, with gay, transgender (sorry Milo), and non-white fascists killing us. The unity of the system as it represents its own opposition, unifying all ideological points on the spectrum to demand that system stands forever more as the purported natural state of reality.
Comments
Thanks for the blog. I saw
Thanks for the blog. I saw clips of this and couldn't stand how they were all throwing around swear words (not that that offends me; it's just so vulgar, especially when you haven't said anything insightful or profound.) I wouldn't have put in the effort myself as I don't think Maher or Milo really deserve any kind of serious analysis or commentary. It would be like commenting on Jerry Springer (which I thought it resembled with all the "fuck" exchanges) or Alex Jones. I mean where do you even begin? I don't blame that Jeremy Scahill person for not wanting to show up.
Yeah, I hope the blog isn't
Yeah, I hope the blog isn't too fluffy, but I figure every now and then something on pop culture is fine. Also, with Milo, he's a lightning rod for attention to the alt-right in the US, which is now very influential on actual policy, with Breitbart's Steve Bannon seen as "President Bannon" by some. It's a weird mix of crypto-fascism and Idiocracy in the US right now. Bannon even picked up on esoteric fascism and Julius Evola, so it seems like some of the countercultural fascists, a weird little subculture here, have somehow become a noticeable grounding for some of the ideology driving policy. I've been wondering about how much white nationalism is catching on as a counterculture. The anti-"PC" backlash has traction, I think, because the Democrats really are the anti-working class elitists the Right populists say they are. The article on "Authoritarian Neoliberalism: the Specter of Pinochet" had some great sections on what allowed the far Right to position themselves as populists. In some ways it's a standard appeal to nationalism, the idea that the patriotic sector of the capitalist class has the back of the "native" working class, and they must fight against not only illegal immigrants, but leftists, social deviants, and thugs who want to undermine the normal workings of capitalist democracy, which is alleged to work if not sabotaged by traitors and leeches.
Adolph Reed notes that identity politics (in this case white nationalism) is what arises in times when class politics has been crushed. My hope is that the stakes will become more apparent to those workers who either voted for Trump or didn't see any gain in voting Clinton (and I didn't vote for her), and necessary battles to try to restore some of the social infrastructure around here will bring conflict along class lines. I mentioned Idiocracy, but it's not that I think workers are stupid for not voting for the Left neoliberal anti-worker party. I think there are psychic wounds based in losing social and material ground, and being talked down to by liberals, who only see racism as a possible cause for the rightward shift, and who assume racism is a default position for some, rather than a mechanism constructed by the ruling class to control labor by dividing it along the "race" line.
Yeah, just to say, I thought
Yeah, just to say, I thought this was really good. Don't know why I bothered watching the segment, it was vomit-inducing and this piece basically summed up exactly why..
Eeew fuck Maher encouraging
Eeew fuck Maher encouraging Milo to become a young Christopher Hitchens??? I can only vomit so much
I liked Larry Wilmore a lot when he debuted, just sad to see him get sucked into neoliberal tv nonsense
Comrade Motopu wrote: Bannon
Comrade Motopu
I been thinking about this too with all this Identity Evropa and NSBM and other college campus bullshit.........
Thanks for that. I had not
Thanks for that. I had not yet seen the Identity Evropa site. It's comical and frightening at the same time. It has all the weasel terms that modern fascists love. "It's not about being white, it's about preserving a culture." Ha ha. It's a reactionary version of PC, where you can't use the openly racist terms that went out of style since the Holocaust, so you dress it up as culture.
Here in Hawaii, it's astonishing sometimes how much of the "anti-colonial" discourse is in your face racialism, with a defense of culture based on essential, ontological, genealogical, arguments that are alarmingly 19th century in their style. I wrote about it here: http://libcom.org/blog/hawaii-class-militancy-or-cultural-patriotism-28062015
It's the politics of "difference." It's mobilized by an academic intelligentsia positioning for their places as spokespeople for "Hawaiians," an ethnic group presented as uncomplicated by class division, all sharing the same broad goals, to be their authentic selves. It's not that the defense of Hawaiian culture in the face of a type of colonialism isn't needed, but the way it is playing out seems to leave inequality unchallenged so long as cultural pride is restored.
Damn thanks I gotta read
Damn thanks I gotta read that....it sounds comparable to challenges in black liberation
Here is a take on
Here is a take on Yiannopoulos from a self described right of center journalist: "Simultaneously vacuous and sinister, equal parts nihilist and narcissist, Yiannopoulos is the model Trump advocate."
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/203888/donald-trumps-little-boy?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_content=Donald+Trump%E2%80%99s+Little+Boy+Is+a+Gay+Half-Jew+With+Jungle+Fever&utm_campaign=july2016
Complete article here:
Yiannopolous took his
Yiannopolous took his nihilistic narcissism a step too far and his advocacy of child-adult sexual relations just got his yet-to-be-published book Dangerous canceled by Simon & Schuster's imprint Threshold Editions. Here's the story in USA Today and here's the video clip where he makes his admission.
seen this
seen this morning:
http://uproxx.com/news/milo-yiannopoulos-defend-pedophilia/
Breitbart employees are
Breitbart employees are threatening to quit if Milo isn't sacked.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/320375-breitbart-employees-threaten-to-leave-over-yiannopoulos
Whether they feel there's a principle at stake or whether it is connected to Breitbart hemorrhaging advertising revenue, idk.
Worth mentioning that women, who used to be his primary target before he expanded his range, have been screaming about Milo for years. Maybe he could be a prime example of why people should be shutting these fuckers down before they actually get elevated to mainstream entertainment and too awful for even Breitbart to stomach.
also ... Quote: The neo-Nazi
also ...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/man-neo-nazi-fliers-calif-college-punched-face-article-1.2976777
It seems Milo has resigned
It seems Milo has resigned from Breitbart. Good to know the line is drawn somewhere. The bad news is:
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/320495-yiannopoulos-resigns-from-breitbart
Fleur wrote: Worth
Fleur
EXACTLY
It might not matter too much,
It might not matter too much, but there is an article titled "How Milo Yiannopoulos Was Brought Down by a 16-Year-Old Canadian Girl." The subheading includes how his empire was "brought down with a single tweet." The title seems to be designed to minimize the importance of on the ground resistance, which was multi-faceted, and of course included the visible participation of the black bloc. It's also frustratingly individualist in the worst bourgeois way, "one person, one tweet, problem solved." Technology practically does the work for you! Ha ha! It's just that easy. The other aspect is of course that it celebrates a young hero, and a female one, so the assumption will be this is a story that balances the machismo of the "Berniebro" Left, and Milo's bigotry and hatred of women. It seems to be another case of the neoliberal (history and class free analysis) cure being as bad as the conservative problem.
How class produced Milo, and
How class produced Milo, and how class may absolve him