Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
One other aspect of the failures of the left in my opinion is how the Left overlooked the realm of Desire that is almost necessarily not satisfied in our contemporary societies. Nagle discusses the frustrated sexuality of the regular young male today and it is a legitimate discussion insofar that it makes up a portion of the frustrated young male who is not politicized until he is pushed towards the misogynistic underbelly of the Web which is again, not necessarily Nazi, but a couple of steps away from it at best. Desire, in this case, is also a desire for the commodity, of course, which also necessarily dissatisfies. When you have the means to buy a given commodity, it fails to restore a sense of satisfaction but rather perpetuates it even further. When you are not able to buy it, well, in an intuitive fashion, you are dissatisfied in a world of instant satisfaction, pornographic images and incessant advertisements. The left’s complete immersion and self-satisfaction with identity politics (LGBT and the alphabet goes on as Zizek was lambasted by critics from the Left when he criticized some of the aspects of the politics of gender in a recent article debate, you can Google it) leaves the room for this new brand of extreme right to tap into the frustration and insecurities of the young male. If you know nothing about the alt-right, its allies, predecessors, etc., you may get some value out of this book. You’ll have to get through a lot of sloppy writing and jabs at transgender people to get to it. The history of the Alt-Right and how the left can fight it is a topic that should be looked into, but it deserves to be written about by a better author than Nagle. The discussion of transgression for transgression’s sake is great. When one considers the inter-war and post-WWII origins of the proliferation of “transgressive” politics or what I call “Nietzschean left”, the turn of events become even more remarkable. A remnant of the transgressive left politics of 1960s, actually 1968, how transgression and cynicism is weaponized by the extreme-right vanguard (in the base, only a fierce anti-PC sentiment is prevalent) seems more contingent than it is a necessary trait of this line of thought. The turn of events looks like it resulted because of numerous failures of the Left.
Clarification (12/1): the bias I mentioned above is (surprisingly) directed toward what Nagle calls “Tumblr liberalism,” which she excoriates as if it is the “Social Justice Warriors” who irritated the alt-right into existence. There are multiple reasons why this is a horribly ignorant argument, but the first has to be the fact that the alt-right is not just a bunch of shitposters and trolls who only recently got off their asses and started publicly doing something. Tumblr leftism is juvenile and bad (I think this is the weakest part of her thesis, but then again I'm a dirty Tumblr leftist) Honestly, I think that if this book had not been rushed to press, it might have been a lot better. The organization is schizophrenic and it often reads like a last-minute thesis, with tons of pretentious theories thrown in, quoted, and not really discussed or examined, just taking up space. Takes one to know one: It's good to know I'm not the only one who writes that way, I guess. But I'm not published. Even a few very simple editorial changes, like offering embedded links in the eBook edition or a glossary of some of the otherwise inscrutable terms, could have made this a better book. Further, she does not have a clear argument, other than both extreme sides are reactionary. I don't think she's asking productive questions, such as why people want to identify as victims or what can be done to correct this situation. It's an argument that's been done to death and I'm not going to rehash it here because Nagle didn't bother either. There's an interesting but undercooked theory about how the Tumblr-Left try to create "outrage scarcity", treating their oppression as a value commodity. Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 14 December 2021.
The yellow vest protesters revolting against centrism mean well – but their left wing populism won't change French politics". Independent.co.uk. 17 December 2018. Archived from the original on 7 May 2022. It could have been longer, for example, and could have touched upon many things that I felt should deserve more detail (e.g. the growing sphere of nu-atheistic pseudo-rationalism; the whole of neoreaction; accelerationism as it appears online, etc.).
a b Gais, Hannah (6 July 2017). "What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021 . Retrieved 14 March 2018.
I wanted to read this ever since it came out. I was on tumblr in the year of our lord 2014 and attended Oberlin College at that time, which is basically used as punching bag in the same way as tumblr is. In fairness, it sometimes was like being on a tumblr dash but in real life at all times. Being a freshman I basically absorbed all of this uncritically and had the same tumblr identity politics as everyone around me, but I was also OBSESSED with lurking on incel forums and even turned in essays analyzing Return of Kings for school. I absolutely read Elliot Rodger's manifesto in full. I considered myself immune from any ideology on those forums because I am basically the exact type of stacy girl that incels hate. All of this is to say, I have been paying attention to both of the worlds in this book for several years and was very excited to read something that would synthesize all that knowledge and draw some useful conclusions. That's about it for the usefulness of the book, and to get to it you have to power through her complaints about trigger warnings and gender identity sprinkled throughout these chapters. Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left. She lumps the left into one big tent, and obviously misunderstands the various factions and arguments being made. Among the few distinctions she makes among the left, she hilariously claims that the ‘real left’ consists of members such as The Young Turks, Owen Jones, Jacobin, and Chapo Trap House. You don’t hear about Marxists, Anarchists, ‘Anti-Imperialists’, and others, Nagles idea of politics left of ‘Tumblr’ stop at Chapo Trap House or Jacobin. She also scolds the left for ‘crying wolf’ when some called Trudeau a white supremacist and defended Hillary Clinton by calling those who disagree with her sexist, to her the Alt-Right is the real wolf. Aside from the ridiculous implication that the Prime Minister of a settler-colonial state like Canada can’t be a white supremacist and it’s just ‘crying wolf’, I’d be very surprised if there is any large group of people who would call Trudeau a white supremacist but also say not supporting Hillary is misogynist. There are NGO-careerists and bourgeois liberals who appropriate social justice theory to support people like Clinton and say that not being pro-Clinton is sexism. These are not the same ideologies that consider Trudeau a white supremacist, which includes marxists, anarchists, and whoever else. Nagle lumps anything she doesn’t like on the left into one big basket labelled ‘Tumblr-Liberalism’, she doesn’t bother making ideological divisions among the left, beyond Tumblr and the ‘real left’ mentioned above, despite doing so for the Alt-Right.
Great Deal 
New Comment