On Nathan J. Robinson. I learnt yesterday that he didn’t do any union-busting, and the departing writers/editors who stirred up so much drama on left-Twitter were lying all along. This article by Yasmin Nair gives the full breakdown with a lot of receipts.
I was linked this article by @HarryLime@hexbear.net in his post yesterday, where NJR was vindicated on calling out Fetterman being terrible back in 2022. The replies to that tweet are filled with people dunking on Nathan, while the quote tweets, almost all from the past couple days, are filled with everyone apologizing.
It’s pretty interesting to see.
I’m currently going through his other tweets. So far, NJR seems like a pretty decent guy with a lot of good analysis', completely different from the caricature I made up in my mind from memes and tweets.
It’s quite strange. I used to read Current Affairs before the “incident” and even listened to the podcast. I liked everyone there, including Nathan. I guess that’s why when I heard what happened, and saw in real time all the people I liked fighting with each other (well, all the people I recognised from the articles and the podcast dunking Nathan), I felt betrayed in a sense. I remember writing an email or filling out a form or something similar that the writers who’d been “fired” had set up. Maybe I donated money too, but I don’t remember that. If I did, it would be a small amount.
And I stopped my subscription to Current Affairs, changing it to Jacobin instead.
There was a lot of trolling that went on. I don’t think I ever tweeted at him personally, but that doesn’t matter. I know I consumed the tweets and posts (even here and on the subreddit back when it existed!)
Why? For me, I guess, it was a sense of justice mixed with betrayal: here was a man who headed an org I respected who had betrayed these principals we all hold dear, and in doing so hurt these other people who I also like. And the only power I have in enacting “justice” is in ridiculing him a little bit.
But even then, that never achieved anything. I won’t say “dunking” as a whole is useless. It can be useful in bringing people together and giving us a sense of camaraderie, but only when it’s against deserving subjects - billionaires and the like. It’s like part of forming an identity around common things we hate.
But… completely divorced from any other forms of unification, any other ways to group and coalesce, all that left is a weak identity that does nothing but dunk for no other purpose. Thats, I guess, what happened to me.
None of us here became leftists for the purpose of trolling others. Using it to hurt and bully others is what people on the right do, even if they consider themselves apolitical sometimes.
But dunking on Nathan…became that. Didn’t it? In the article, Yasmin Nair points to real world examples of people bullying him. I imagine they did so out of a similar feeling of “betrayal”, and sought “justice” too. But how would that achieve it? It wouldn’t. It can’t.
This happened because we separated our actual politics - leftism - from our online activities. Maybe not all of us, but I’d wage at least quite a few. If Current Affairs had failed in the years between the Incident and the start of Jan, 2024, I would’ve thought “sad this happened, but serves him right” with no thought to the actual damage that would’ve done to the real world impacts of losing a magazine like that to left politics.
That’s a failing on my part. It’s a failing that I let my personal grievances with Nathan (Ill-informed as I now know) shut me off completely from Current Affairs as a whole, with all the great writers who work and publish there, then and now.
I remember there was an effort, early on in this site’s history, of making this place more than just a place to shitpost online - to actually be used to organise. It failed, partly because we were small and partly because we were too resistant. There were also onboarding efforts to allow us to grow to mitigate that first problem, but it ran into the second one, our resistance to change, and, well, here we are today. Is there anyone here who remembers those days? What a mess. Since then, a lot of original people who created and did the heavy lifting of maintaining this site, including creatively, left.
I remember enquiring sometime ago, maybe 2022, maybe 2023, about what happened to the writers who left Current Affairs. Have they found other jobs? Where are they working, publishing, podcasting? I wanted to support them. I didn’t figure it out. Some have now deleted their Twitter, others have privated their accounts. Maybe it’s for the best.
Maybe things could’ve been different if we could’ve grown and changed and been the place for atleast left-adjacent people to come by the time Reddit exploded and people started to migrate to Lemmy. Who knows? That’s a different world, and probably also a different post. But at least we could learn something from our mistakes. I am trying to from mine. —
This went in directions I wasn’t expecting. I just typed out my thoughts as they came to me. You don’t really have to read it.
TLDR: “I’m sorry, Nathan” and maybe dunking, without any thing else, is not good.
NJR is a anti-Marxist demsoc who dresses like he's about to give a lecture on phrenology. If he's been vindicated, then fine, good for him. But I don't think it demands a lot of of soul searching from anyone who dunked on him. And personally I was around for the old days too. It was pretty much like it is now and the obstacles to organizing here were the same then as they are now, which is why it didn't happen.
no investigation no right to speak, no posting of your own drip no right to speak
Boy it be awful if that was even close to what I said huh
From the post I linked in the text:
I’m not saying he’s Vijay Prasad. There’s only so much I can expect from any western leftist, Hexbear included. But he’s created a successful leftist magazine that some people tried to tear down and were thankfully unsuccessful. Learning about what went on has made me do some soul-searching and conclude a world with Current Affairs, and NJR writing what he writes, is better than one without, no matter our disagreements.
Also, we’re using DemSoc as a pejorative now too, huh? I remember when we used to split hairs, saying SucDem were acceptable to dunk on because they actually just wanted Nordic-style welfare states, but DemSocs were genuine socialists. I guess the circle of acceptable leftists must get ever smaller. The site can’t remain left unity forever. When will the anarchists (the few that remain) be culled?
Lmao, he said on the Current Affairs podcast that the left would be better off if Marx had never existed. That's how people got the idea that he had scant regard for Marx.
Reading this in a weepy Jordan Peterson Kermit voice. It's a description of his position, not a pejorative jesus
Damn, he actually came up with a worse take than Chomsky's "The fall of the USSR was the best thing to happen to socialism".
What a time to be alive.
Westoids on here will still defend him because they never met a succ imperialist they didn’t like
If I had a time machine that could take me to a white room outside space and time which contained both baby Karl Marx and baby Hitler, I would shoot Marx twice, because without socialism Hitler wouldn't have been able to commit genocide
With how much this guy has been straight-up lied about, and given his verbatim statements directly to the contrary, I'm not going to believe this unless someone posts his actual words, not a summary from someone who doesn't like him.
There are plenty of posts from the time discussing it. Here's someone purportedly quoting him verbatim.
But there's also a lot of deleted posts. This was like 3-4 years ago. Believe what you want ig
A guy who writes 10,000 word articles every other day supposedly hates Marx, but no one has an article where he actually bashes Marx? He's supposed to have said something on a podcast, but we don't have the podcast to listen to, we just have years old tweets of people supposedly quoting one line from it, devoid of even basic context?
A bunch of people repeating smears they don't actually know the basis of would look exactly like this. And we know that's happened once to the guy already.
I remember this when it actually happened, so I find it quite easy to believe. But there's enough link rot that it's hard to pinpoint where it was said and I'm not going to listen to every episode of the podcast from around that time just to prove it to you, no offense.
I also remember when "he hates Marx" started circulating, and I remember tracking down an episode where he mentioned Marx and thinking "Oh he thinks some leftists treat Marx a little dogmatically? That's all this is?"
I don't think it makes sense to rip on other leftists without receipts to back it up. If you think the only receipt is buried in some obscure corner of the internet 3-4 years back, maybe this is not an especially key part of the guy's thinking.
Perhaps you're right about that. However I maintain that being skeptical of Jacobin style dudes who dress as dandies is reasonable as a default stance
Skepticism is reasonable, sure. I just think we have to be a little more careful about writing leftist figures off, because (1) we can't get anywhere if we tear each other apart and (2) there are tons of bad actors who want to create and encourage leftist infighting.
when @Nakoichi@hexbear.net bans them for making cringe posts
The kind Vladimir Ilyich would have ~~shot~~ banned everyone here
"socialism is when you agree with me and the more you agree with me the more socialister it is"
Hell yeah
We will boil Vijay Prashad soon as well inshallah