Dude just loves riling himself up into a frenzy, doesn’t he? I guess he was mad that Hasan was going to interview Obama, which never even happened, and now he thinks Hasan is a “genocide supporter” because a random YouTube clip he came across that said “Hasan supports Kamala’s policies”, which he never even watched and was most likely just clipped. Hasan isn’t perfect, but fuck, you think at least him going to the DNC as a journalist would be considered fair from BE. Wild.

    • WhyEssEff [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      all I will say regarding this is that my brother started watching Hasan a year ago and he’s gone from a biden supporter to a kamala-despising communist, so if Hasan’s role is funnelling disaffected people back into liberalism, anecdotally, he’s very much failing at that shrug-outta-hecks

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        This is the reason I am in general fine with whatever Hasan’s shenanigans are. Honestly my biggest reason that I do not hate his nepo-baby existence is because he is the anti-Vaush, whereas Vaush’s pipeline is anarchist to natoist, Hasan’s is clearly democrat to communist.

        It’s all still very fucking stupid and I wish the kids would get their politics elsewhere, from like actual lived experiences, but I will settle.

        • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          I just wish people could sit down and read, for their own sake. I’m guilty of doing very little reading myself (only read a couple modern theory books and 2 Marx and Lenin books lol) but the fact that everything complex has to get simplified into videos and clips just makes it incredibly hard to transmit a whole different worldview.

        • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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          It’s all still very fucking stupid and I wish the kids would get their politics elsewhere, from like actual lived experiences, but I will settle.

          Could you expand on this?

          • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            A better, and more helpful way for young leftists to ‘do politics’ when you are young is not through media consumption, but through actual participation in politics. In particular, a very interesting breeding ground for these experiences is school politics, where you will begin, if you can even run a successful campaign in the first place (which is a learning experience itself) how systems of power actually influence the world, like how a 'democratic institution" is actually completely at the whims of an undemocratic bureaucracy.

            For example, when I was a young rad-lib in high school, I was treasurer for two years in a row, with one of the major projects that happened in our first year being the development of a subsidized after-school study program for under-performing students that would actually pay kids to be there (we could only afford 5 dollars an hour a day, but it was better than nothing). This was because most of the kids I knew that were struggling in school also had other money problems this would require not doing expensive dances, but we felt that if we could get students even a little extra time, it could potentially get us more government money for the school in general. Surprisingly, most of the student government was on board with it. After running it through a bunch of different things, we eventually were able to vote on a version of the program that would run for only one month before standardized testing. Not great, but again, better than nothing.

            After the vote, we went to the administration to iron out the details with them, and they immediatly put the kai-bosh on it, killing the program in the womb and telling us we were interfering with academic programming and that it was illegal. To be fair, it might not be legal to pay kids to go to school, but we didn’t know that.

            The next year we were allowed to spend a bunch of money on a huge new American flag and huge dance venue on a military base, being strictly monitored throughout our voting process. You know, things that only benefit rich kids and subsidize costs that the administration themselves should be spending.

            It was one of the eye-openers for me and really started me down the path of radicalization, more so than any event that was mediated (the Iraq war etc.) in particular it taught me not to trust what I believed at the time were ‘so-called liberal administrators’. My full turn toward M-L theory and communism came after watching and participating in the Bernie campaign, but I likely would have never done that without those formative experiences in actual student politics.

            Meanwhile, almost every radical anarchist kid I knew in school (we didn’t have any commies at the time), that didn’t participate in student government because it was ‘lame and pointless’ (which, ya know, fair) has become some form of hyper-online right-wing libertarian or anarcho-natoist in their thirties. It’s one of those things where I feel like because they never actually are where the rubber hits the road, their politics are almost purely reactionary, as opposed to attempting to be forward thinking, program oriented and analytical. The real ones were big in Food Not Bombs, and aren’t as online.

        • SeekTheDeletion [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          It’s all still very fucking stupid and I wish the kids would get their politics elsewhere, from like actual lived experiences

          this is the point users in here seem to miss

          but I will settle.

          I won’t

          • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            Scolding the kids will only get you so far. They have to have time to grow up. That being said, I do not take the political convictions of teenagers very seriously, much like I don’t take the political convictions of academics very seriously, because neither are fully engaged with the life experience of the industrial proletariat.

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                Parenti absolutely was an academic. And he’s a good one. A great one even. That said, it wouldn’t have shaken my personal political convictions of he had suddenly denounced the entirety of his work and endorsed the democrats, or suddenly decided the USSR was bad actually, and that anarchist Catalonia was the one true leftist movement. He’s just an observer, not a participant, in revolution.

                This is opposed to someone like Trotsky, who I take far more seriously, who for me has taken many years of exposure and reading to understand what elements of his criticism of the USSR are valid, and what parts are cuckoo-bananas ideological hallucinations given the period of time he lived in. And for Trotsky, his criticisms got more outlandish the less involved and responsible he was with the actual process of government. Another example, someone like Gorbachev should be taken seriously, but given his cowardice to publicly oppose Stalin’s popularity with the people of the USSR after his death, it is difficult to treat him as acting in good faith.

                I take revolutionaries and their histories and ideas very seriously. Half the reason I take Marx seriously is because Mao, Lenin, and Ho Chi Mihn take him seriously, and understanding revolutionary theory in the 20th century is impossible without understanding him.

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              this is why having a Twitch Streamer celebrity as a “pipeline” to being “leftist” is completely irrelevant and not a point in streamer’s favor. Oh so the kids online are consuming a different flavor of brainrot content? So what? It’s all a fake online game if this is your avenue of approach and I suspect people in this thread take umbrage with that analysis because they also approached from this angle and to some extent, it’s a fake online game to them too

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        all I will say regarding this is that my brother started watching Hasan a year ago and he’s gone from a biden supporter to a kamala-despising communist, so if Hasan’s role is funnelling disaffected people back into liberalism, anecdotally, he’s very much failing at that

        Hasan repeatedly shutting down anti-“tankie” rhetoric is the source of this.

        Everyone that either silently allows that shit or vocally supports it funnels people back into the dems.

        Everyone that does not allow that shit funnels people into further radicalisation.

        It’s that simple.

        • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          BE does this with his insufferable ultra shit. If he did anything but sit in his gamer chair and spend half his time punching left I wouldn’t hate him as much.

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    Hasan has lib moments but he’s good on >90% of issues. He has a massive audience to which he spreads leftist ideas, like it’s honestly so lucky that one of the biggest streamers on twitch is pro-China and singlehandedly normalizing Xi chad memes on the platform. He also reaches a lot of non-political people thanks to being friends with people like Ludwig, Valkyrae or pokimane, introducing them and their audiences to expressly political figures like Felix Biedermann and Brace Belden.

    Good luck starting the revolution by hissing at everyone who doesn’t already agree with you.

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    Dialectical materialism is me wanting to shit on Hasan for being a sheepdog millionaire living in a mansion vs me wanting to shit on BadEmpanada for being a deranged sexpat gringo holed up in Argentina

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    Unless you’re just some dude in the Gobi desert who doesn’t even have internet, there is zero merit to being this absolutist

  • We need to stop purity testing and seeing if people are “good” and start seeing if people are useful instead. Hasan might be a bit cuddled up with libs(bad) and is a millionaire(owns a house) but he provides a useful service and pipeline for the left, making him useful. Norman Finkelstein is a transphobe(bad), but his analysis is invaluable and is tremendously useful to the left. I don’t care if a person is good or moral. I care if they help the left. BE occasionally produces valuable content and I applaud him for that, but this is nonsensical, idealist, individualist drivel from him.

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      I dislike both of them but I fucking HATE bad empanada for acting like the most smartest leftest boy in the room all the time while being nothing more than a streamer just like Hasan. At least Hasan is honest about what he is.

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        I don’t watch either but I think this is the distinction that I see as well, with the addition that I only ever really hear about BE when he’s trying to start some clout-chasing fight with somebody else. I guess maybe that’s because Hasan doesn’t need to chase clout but it’s definitely the most lame thing about BE.

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    I don’t even disagree with BE on much (this is one of the things) but I just had to stop watching him because it made me so miserable. I don’t think that man has ever had a positive thought, or if he ever has he certainly hasn’t ever made it apparent. Just constant rage and hostility. Not to say it’s unwarranted, ruthless criticism etc etc, but it does get incredibly exhausting and depressing to watch.

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      Watching Hasan usually makes me feel better about negative events. If I stick to my own thoughts and whatever media and shitposting I see, I spiral into depression but Hasan seems to always give a good perspective where you can stay mad but not let it ruin your entire mood. IDK maybe he is just sexy and calms me down

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      his anger is absolutely for the right reasons but he cares way too much about the wrong things and its exhausting how every day theres a new lefty hes ruthlessly (and usually rightfully) upset at. hes a smart guy for sure but dude is like the greek god of negativity

    • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      Hasan is generally extremely treat-brained, and he isn’t as harsh on liberalism or as supportive of AES as us. The difference in opinion is whether he serves the purpose of radicalizing liberals, or preventing further radicalization.

      I’m of the opinion that he generally works more for radicalization than against it.

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              they banned r/cth because we kept posting John Brown memes

              That may have been their excuse to pull the trigger but the reason they banned us was because the sub was becoming very well known, with posts regularly making it to the front page. During a time when reddit was really starting to actively sanitize itself of any actual leftism (for the sake of advertisers, profit, etc. as well as for the sake of becoming the major NATO propaganda hub that it is today) r/cth represented the complete opposite of the direction they were steering the platform. It was quite literally a purge of leftists across the platform and it would have happened whether or not we toed the line by not saying slave owners deserve death anymore or posting John Brown memes. In short, the sub was just starting to get some hints of more mainstream internet attention and there was no way in hell they were going to let that stand.

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      Maybe it’s just an artefact of the inherent tribalism in any active movement. I haven’t really made up my mind fully on this, but it does seem more and more true that “in group” fighting over differences is more vitriolic than out group?

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        In-group fighting can seem more intense because mutual understanding is assumed, vs outgroup. Marxists can laugh at liberals but tend to take other Marxists seriously enough to get upset, as an example

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        Its not in group out group fighting its indovidualism. Individuals thinking they know the way and need to attack others for not thinking that way, instead of being systematic about pushing everybody forward.

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          defending treatbrained streamers as your vanguard of systematic “pushing everybody forward” is actually an extremely capitalist-realist analysis. the way forwards is not twitch streamers, stop trying to make capitalist entertainment products into your friends and also the revolution.

          • Walk_On [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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            Even Hasan would agree with this analysis lol.

            That being said, he did say in a recent stream that “you aren’t going to vote the revolution in” so I’d say he’s more then a “treatbrained streamer”.

          • SevenSkalls [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            We live in capitalism. Whatever method we use, capitalism will be involved. If someone makes money on Twitch while helpfully radicalizing more people in the right direction, I see that as a good thing. It’s definitely worked in the opposite direction to make reactionaries, and there’s no reason to give up those methods.

            It’s like how electoralism won’t save us but by running and being crushed Bernie helped radicalized a lot of people. He definitely did more good doing that and introducing socialist ideas, making more future anarchists and socialists than basically every socialist I know of, than every every podcaster or reading circle I’ve seen since.

            • usa_suxxx [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              If someone makes money on Twitch while helpfully radicalizing more people in the right direction, I see that as a good thing.

              I mean, the 2024 election year is very dead. You had at least Bernie Sanders sheep dogging people into the Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020. Now, there’s not even a need for a sheep dog. You’re a Trump supporter if you bring up anything. Like, I don’t really think a lot of people are radicalizing as stated. Something isn’t working as believed.

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                It’s not great, especially materially, but narrative-wise things look better than when I was a kid in the 90’s: the USSR had fallen, and everyone agreed communism had failed. You couldn’t even say the word “socialist” let alone “communist” when I was younger, let alone anyone admit they were one. I think there’s just been a liberal backlash to these changes as they try to reconstitute control and power of the narrative, but there’s been progress.

                The main problem as I see it is just we’re not organizing fast enough for the problems capitalism are causing, like climate change, and also foreign policy is still dog shit among most progressives. Also, I worry that this revolutionary atmosphere happened in the 60’s too and was dismantled by the police state, so I’m hoping we learned some lessons from that time somehow.

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                  The main problem as I see it is just we’re not organizing fast enough for the problems capitalism are causing

                  Wonder if that has anything to do with kids sitting inside watching a guy be “radical” on their behalf and feeling like they’ve done something?

              • SevenSkalls [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                Dude I don’t even watch Hasan. I’ve learned more about him here on hexbear than I have anywhere else lol. But the point is that I now see more kids complain about modern imperialism and talk about other concepts I would’ve never imagined could’ve pierced the liberal media bubble who mention him than at any other time in life (since maybe peak Chapo?). You’ve got to adapt to the times and environment we have, and start somewhere.

                Or you could let that whole audience get scooped up by Tim Pool, Destiny, Joe Rogan, Vaush, don’t know who else is popular on the streaming circuit but you get my point. Because, believe it or not, consumed media does make a HUGE difference. It’s half the reason this current fight is so damn hard right right now, because of manufactured consent in the media.

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            Im not talking about streamers i mean on the left in general. Before there was twitter there were 400 groups writing position papers on each others position papers and getting nothing done

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                Yea good thing the first world had all those successful communist revolutions that definitely werent impacted by individualism to the highest degree. I dont give a fuck about any of these internet people so i dont know why ur so aggressive.

                • SeekTheDeletion [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                  I’m aggressive because it’s frustrating having to deal with 500 eternal waves of radlib children who repeat the same dumb lib shit over and over to defend what are essentially celebrities.

  • MiraculousMM [he/him, any]@hexbear.netM
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    Streamers aren’t revolutionaries, at their absolute best they can serve as a piece of the pipeline to the left. It’s good that Hasan’s audience (the majority of whom are basically kids) is being exposed to consistent and principled anti-imperialism. I wish that didn’t come with all the baggage of making his millions off of that same audience but I don’t think its a net negative considering we live in a society etc etc.

    That being said BadEmpanada is a drama-seeking childish weenie who contributes very little that other minor internet celebrities don’t already do better and more consistently