• CTHlurker [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I still don't understand what the fuck is up with the entire :wtyp-gang: and their respective ideologies. Like I understand that Liam is a weird anarchist who mostly hates cops, and who gets dunked on by his weirdo Trotskyite dad, and Roz seems to just want to burn the US to the ground and build traintracks on the ashes. Alice is pro-USSR but anti AES, which is such a strange combination of things to believe in, that I struggle to understand how she even arrived at that specific conclusion.

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      She is a white-British-trans-Muslim who I am 90% positive was either in the military or at least whatever the British equivalent of the ROTC was, who was going to get a law degree (in Britain!) before stumbling ass-backwards into podcasting fame (?) and success.

      Everything about her and her opinions is incredibly idiosyncratic, and I think mostly proves that if Allah exists, they mostly love her and fucking with all of us.

      • hypercube [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        nah she was cadets afaik, which is weird army grooming shit for when you're 12-18, not actual military stuff

      • CTHlurker [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, I still follow both WTYP and Trashfuture, so I know sort of what Alice's identity is. I just still don't understand anything about how she arrives at the conclusions that she does. I also DESPERATELY want to ask her if she became muslim before or after she had her egg-crack-moment (sorry, not entirely sure what the correct terminology is).

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          I've been listening a long time to most of their stuff (long shifts and needing to fill time mostly, I limit myself to listening to the entire History of Rome once a year), and all I can tell you is that it is mostly based off of whatever they think will piss 'tankies' (basically Twitter ML's) off the most.

          There is no real coherent theory, or justification, or any actual thought, I'm pretty sure it comes down to mostly oppositional posting. Egg on people who don't know how to log off to feed the algorithm.

          Also, no idea. I would probably not like to talk to her for any real length of time, because, much like Zizek, she is a deeply unserious person.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          I just still don’t understand anything about how she arrives at the conclusions that she does.

          She got to spend a quarter of her life eating shit for being Trans. That'll leave its mark. If she was raised in the Balkins or Belarus, I imagine she might have come out as an anti-comm reactionary for similar reasons. Also, she's Scottish, I think? Which means she's predisposed to kinda hate England on principle as well as the merits.

          Plenty of American Leftists who run the spectrum on bad beliefs. But I notice Alice eating tons of shit more for being a high profile trans-podcaster-leftist than for anything she says that's particularly damning. A woman on five different podcasts who didn't issue the occasional bad-take would either be the most PC organism on the planet or the reincarnation of Lenin.

          I also DESPERATELY want to ask her if she became muslim before or after she had her egg-crack-moment

          I feel like this has been answered at some point somewhere. But it also kinda feels like it was synchronous. In a Western WASP country, Islamic spirituality offered a refuge from Anglican bigotry.

          • CTHlurker [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            On the Bicycle episode of WTYP she mentioned having grown up in Southern London, which also explains why she hasn't got anything resembling a scottish accent. She does however live in Glasgow and have been for a while. Honestly I don't think she gets more shit for being a trans podcaster as much as she gets constantly shat on for being extremely online. Like I get that her job is to make entertainment, and I've even admitted to still following some of her work, so clearly she is good at it, but she really needs to stop tweeting sometimes.

            Also American leftists have plenty of bad takes, and they also usually get told to shut the fuck up. Only reason the Chapo guys don't feature more on this site is because only a fraction of our active users even follow them.

            • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              she really needs to stop tweeting sometimes.

              Sure. Her and the rest of us.

              But this is a woman with politics easily comparable to a Jack Flores or Liz Fransac. She's routinely described in the same terms as Va*sh or Destiny.

              Only reason the Chapo guys don’t feature more on this site is because only a fraction of our active users even follow them.

              Which sort of begs the question of where they're even coming from.

              • CTHlurker [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Do a lot of people here follow Liz Fransac? I have no idea who the fuck Jack Flores is, but I don't remember seeing a lot of people talk about Liz' personal twitter. I also don't really think most people here listen to Truanon in the first place, so she naturally will get less scrutiny than Alice, who is still the cohost of one of the better podcasts :wtyp:

                • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  A lot of people follow TrueAnon. Brace is the more colorful one, but Liz Franczak (apologies for my butchered spelling in the original) does a ton of the leg work.

                  I have no idea who the fuck Jack Flores

                  Should be Jake. He's the lead on Pod Damn America. And he's at least as popular as anyone at The Antifada or Rev Left Radio.

                  she naturally will get less scrutiny than Alice,

                  If you're hooked into the Nate Bethay extended universe but you don't follow any of the folks who frequently show up on the Chapo podcast... throws up hands

                  How the fuck did you even find this place?

                  • CTHlurker [he/him]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    I listened to Chapo for quite a long time, and made an account here within the first week of this site opening, after the original ChapoTrapHouse sub got banned. I vaguely know what you mean by Nate Bethay-universe, but I don't typically listen to anything that gets plugged by the guests on the Chapo pod.

          • sempersigh [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            It seems pretty transparent to me when beloved figures like Felix Biederman have expressed the exact same anti covid restriction sentiment on Twitter and the podcast but nobody seems to bring it up.

            The guy has tweets getting pissy about having to wear a mask in the gym but if Alice said something like that it would get 500 upbeats in the dunk tank lol

    • pumpchilienthusiast [comrade/them, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Liam is actually a Markov bot programmed solely with "go fuck yourselves"

      Roz seems to just want to burn the US to the ground and build traintracks on the ashes.

      no wonder roz is my favorite

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Alice is pro-USSR but anti AES, which is such a strange combination of things to believe in, that I struggle to understand how she even arrived at that specific conclusion.

      USSR: had some white people

      AES: have no white people

      It's really that simple. You shouldn't have to think too hard about it. It's like how liberals don't understand why people like Trump when people like Trump mostly because he's a white supremacist piece of shit and they're also white supremacist pieces of shit.

      • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Same with the GDR jokes, 1. Doesn't exist anymore (I don't here anybody laughing at unwavering support for cuba) and 2. Is white, are the criteria for supporting socialism

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I'm asking what this is in reference to, not what names you've decided to call her.

          • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            have you listened to Kill James Bond? The hosts there, including Alice, are open about how they uphold the legacy of the USSR and the GDR in both joking and unironic terms. This is in stark contrast to her feelings on, say, Cuba, Vietnam, or China, which either aren’t mentioned, or are spoken of the same way the BBC would, uncritical restatement of propaganda

            • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              have you listened to Kill James Bond?

              Cover to Cover. One of the few podcasts I actually pay for, even through the Winter of Content.

              The hosts there, including Alice, are open about how they uphold the legacy of the USSR and the GDR in both joking and unironic terms.

              I got an earful of coverage about the GDR during "The Lives of Others" episode and if you think they "upheld" its "legacy", you're deeply mistaken. As to the USSR, Alice is deeply ambivalent on it in pretty much every podcast setting. WTYP - the Supersonic aircraft and Nedelin Catastrophe eps - have her utterly torn between their ambitions and failures. The Nicolae Ceausescu episode might as well have been about the fuck-ups of Eastern European central planning. While she's happy to slam "The Internationale" button to egg on Liam, she's no Stalinist by any stretch.

              This is in stark contrast to her feelings on, say, Cuba, Vietnam, or China, which either aren’t mentioned, or are spoken of the same way the BBC would, uncritical restatement of propaganda

              Which episode trashes Cuba or Vietnam? Again, I keep hearing these vague insinuations and unsourced allegations. I'm still waiting for a thing she actually said that justifies the criticism. The worst thing I've heard her say about Cuba is that it is a poor country. And she's hardly shy about saying why the blockade is to blame.

              The only criticisms I've heard on China are the exact same criticisms you hear from every other Western Leftist - namely, that Xi's not hitting the Full Communism button fast or hard enough, that even Chinese cops fall under ACAB, that Taiwan is a lost cause, etc. Even then, it tends to be couched in the "I'm no expert on China" and "Hardly worse than what Americans are up to" caveats.

              I fucking wish the BBC anchors had that attitude towards the AES states.

              • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
                ·
                2 years ago

                She’s big on the Xinjiang propaganda till this day, idk what to tell you. I’ve never heard her make a positive assessment of the Chinese path to socialism in any way

                • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  She’s big on the Xinjiang propaganda till this day

                  Point to the episode. Point to the tweet. Show me where the body is buried.

                  I’ve never heard her make a positive assessment of the Chinese path to socialism in any way

                  Fuck, you sound like one of those dipshit Republicans whining about Barack Obama never saying "Radical Islamic Terror". Ted Cruz wants his talking points back.

    • Fishroot [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Alice is pro-USSR but anti AES, which is such a strange combination of things to believe in, that I struggle to understand how she even arrived at that specific conclusion.

      well, if a country doesn't exist anymore, it doesn't have to deal with modern contradictions. A dead country will then become a mythical land for people to jerk off intellectually on.