Hey the really cool question is: when is .World going to start complying with German law and purge all the pro-Palestinian content because itās āantisemitismā?
Hey the really cool question is: when is .World going to start complying with German law and purge all the pro-Palestinian content because itās āantisemitismā?
Ahh you see this has all been already settled for you, take the case of Twitter.
Calls of violence are not allowed on Twitter! Wow so simple right? What if there was a notorious user who was also a US President and made a call for violence? Wellā¦ guess what Twitter clarified those rules by saying:
Youāre allowed to call for violence if youāre talking about Americaās foreign policy.
Thatās why you can say ādeath to Assadā but you canāt say ādeath to healthcare CEOā. Itās all propaganda anyway. While there are liberals who truly believe āall lives matterā, theyāre few and far between, most liberals use civility as cover for their ideology. Thatās why healthcare CEO death is bad, but Assad death is good.
US 2010: āWeāve created and incentivised this gigantic drag net of information based on insecure protocols, private partnership deals, FISA court orders, and outright black budget illegalityā
US 2024: āPweeze use encrypted communication (that we have vendor relations with or that we have backdoors in or that we built as a honey pot) because China can see whatās happening in the drag net and they can leverage that information to compromise our idiot elites.ā
Damn this one helped a ton. Apperantly itās gravely sandy loam, but they 100% have the rock composition wrong, but thatās to be expected because my property is on a ridge.
Imma be honest. I have tried my fucking hardest to learn this multiple times trying to roughly figure out what the best kind of foundation for stuff is and what I need to do to have better soil for vegitables, but itās impossible to do without hands on instruction.
It also doesnāt help that topsoil where I am is often hummus due to leaf decomposition so itās hard to figure out if I actually have āloamā or itās something else, but also the fact that since I live on the side of a ridge you get like 3 types of āsand heavyā soil if you dig out a 4x4x2 box.
I think āHasan exposes people to leftist ideasā is great and all, but your argument has the following lynch pin:
The right has a pipeline thatās working pretty damn well to slowly convert people from neocons to fascism, and it often starts with talking about their entertainment or being in the guise of entertainment itself (like with comedians, like Rogan, Crowder, etc).
This has a couple of parts we need to inspect:
The Right has it easy. Itās why they can be boring, lazy, stupid and evil. They have it easy because not only are they the status-quo, but their arguments have big salacious things they can point to. Capitalism exists, the US Empire exists, and peopleās suffering exist. The right doesnāt actually need people to continue itās project in the same way the left needs people. The Right can sustain itself on morons running into walls until the whole system collapses under its own weight. There is a pinprick of sunlight between your average neocon and your average fascist. Hell thereās only a 4ft window of sunlight between a liberal and a fascist. The last 2 libs that ran were hard to distinguish from fascists if you understand fascism (most people only understand the aesthetics of fascism and only in particular contexts). Fascism is easy because itās the logical ends of an already existing system of capitalism. All you have to do is give the morons something to do and let the system run, thatās why culture war is great for the right. Fascism more or less exists as a real and in-power political force in most of the Western World.
The Left needs people to build an alternative, something that doesnāt exist, something that works for everyone, something intelligent and intelligible. The only way to do this is to be armed with the knowledge of the past, cognizant enough to understand the landscape of the present, have enough foresight to visualize the future, planing capacity to deal with the logistics, and the resources to put it into motion.
āRoganismā will never deliver these things. In fact āRoganismā will simply get you a bunch of consumers. The only way that āRoganismā will prevail for the left is if we are already at war and we simply need bodies to take orders and to pull triggers.
Now Hasan isnāt really responsible for any of this, heās an entertainer. Heās a good entertainer, he has okay politics. But thatās it, thereās no there there beyond that.
Hasan makes $1.4 million a year about probably more now. If we pretend that everyone paying for that is āthe leftā, weāre doing the same type of spending as we criticize the DNC for. Hasan is our Beyonce concert, our Oprah interview, itās just spread out over the whole year. That didnāt work for the Democrats. Meanwhile the Democrats also have it easy. 90% of what they want literally just exists as is. They can be losers forever if they wanted to, and they do.
The Democrats might be missing a āmessageā or āpolicyā or any desire to help people in any realistic way that isnāt a spreadsheet, and itās stupid that they paid for Beyonce thinking it will get them over the line. Leftists donāt have a unified platform and donāt even have a machine, but itās smart that we āpayā for Hasan? Thatās really the argument that Iām reading from all this:
Itās the same argument:
I think one thing a lot of Westerners donāt want to understand is that socialism necessitates the death of American media culture. That includes the Hasan path, because what is Hasan under socialism? The US overproduces media culture to the point where itās gig work, because of the same exact reason that āRoganismā works. Hasanās path under socialism is to either go back to an organization where he will be subjected to the same if not worse circumscription he had at TYT, pick another career or at best be the last of a dying breed. No socialist economy is actually going to be able to support the ecology of streamers needed to generate Hasans. Hasan likes what he does, when push comes to shove is he going to give it up for socialism? Itās really easy to say that, itās another thing to actually do it. Given his personal consumption and what he talks about, I have my doubts that Hasan is going to tighten the Gucci belt for us.
A lot of Western socialists assume that the desired individualized labor mix of the population is a realistic goal. The idea that everyone does what they want to do is not real. Yes people will still want to do certain necessary jobs, but that doesnāt mean enough people will want to do them to ensure social reproduction. We can talk about robots and magical maguffins till the cows come home, but in practice until those maguffins are created and function good enough humans will still have to do those jobs.
I donāt subscribe to the Intercept and read them all the time you can click out of their paywall.
Spoiler itās everyoneās favorite whodunnit with Syrian chemical weapons.
Haha. If this comment section is positive it proves nobody read the actual articleā¦ because in the middle of it is a huge trigger for a certain kind of user around here lmao.
If youāre from the UK the situation is the same. The entire system came down on Corbyn, but there are very few places in the world right now where there are real leftist politics happening.
Yeah this is a read on power thatās made by babies and libs.
āThey said the magic words that made the law spell work. Why canāt you do that America???ā
Yoonās coup failed because he failed to secure the centers of power (in SK this is literally the chaebol families) in his corner, not because the Parliament did a ritual.
Thatās weird, because the class = relation to labor stuff is literally in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels
I would challenge you to actually find such a quote, because such a claim doesnāt make a lot of sense in the language of Marxism. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is effectively a literary review of āhow we got hereā and such a definition of class excludes classes of feudalism which are covered in that work. Not only that but a peasantās relation to labor is vastly different within the peasant class. Some peasants have a relation to labor in the same way as the bourgeoisie, some the same as the petite bourgeoisie, and some without any real relation to labor at all. And yet peasants are a distinct class according to all modern Marxists.
Kulaks were literally a class according to the Bolsheviks, which was at its clearest defined as a class based more-so on wealth than relation to labor. It wasnāt really until Maoism that a more complete understanding of socialist class was developed especially in relation to peasants since communism was mostly developed as a collaboration between educated urban intelligentsia and urban workers.
The difference between the proletarian class and the lumpen proletarian class is generally accepted in modern times not as their relation to labor but their relation to communism(or more specifically class consciousness) itself. Like the problems around the peasants most communism between 1840 ~ 1970 had trouble working through the entirety of the urban landscape, so ānormal peopleā that were difficult to qualify or deemed morally degenerate by various authors were just put into the lumpen space. It wasnāt until the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords took a look around and said the normal people around us donāt fit into pure āproletarianā definitions. That begged the question of ādoes this mean that communism is doomed?ā. As a natural consequence of this these groups that lead the way in the theory and practical organizing spaces to start speaking about working with and activating the lumpen proletariat in earnest rather than casting them off as dregs that could only be useful to counter revolutionary forces.
The last reason this doesnāt make sense is that wealth is capital which under a capitalist system is the means of production in and of itself. Marx himself even goes further to say that accumulation of wealth is systemic and has an equilibrium with the accumulation of misery.
"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus- population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital (Marxās Capital, p. 661)
Hasan has accumulated much capital, therefore according to Marx has also accumulated much misery because he is not exempt from the systemic nature of capitalism. Hasan very often in response to house gate says āThereās no ethical consumptionā. The corollary here is that thereās no ethical production, and there is no ethical accumulation.
Whether your faves are implicated or not Marxism is a sociological system of the poorest, those among us who are wealthy communists should have much more personal sin to grapple with than those who are poor, that is our privilege.
Everything else you said is weird too online gossip so Iāll just move on.
This whole thread is weird too online gossip if you havenāt noticed.
I was just correcting an incorrect sentiment in this post that having wealth means you canāt be on the side of the working class.
This is true, however this is actually hard to prove, and denying Hasanās implication in the capitalist system and his accumulation of wealth simply because Hasan is popular is a willful misunderstanding of Marxism. Having in-house conversations is literally how people advance their understandings of Marxism, whatās happening in much of this thread is denying those conversations via thought terminating cliches but from the left, because many see this as a āgrand posting battleā. Iām not advocating that we have to game out a percentage of Hasan good or Hasan bad, Iām arguing that we have to understand Hasan as Marxists warts and all. That understanding is not happening because in this circumstance stan culture is at odds with Marxism.
Lastly itās my view that if Hasan is indeed a āfellow travelerā and someone who people learn āthe leftā/Marxism/whatever from, he should be showing us this journey himself, instead of steeling himself because of his constant battles with H3 or Destiny or whoever. Otherwise this is just kayfabe.
Fun fact I watched Hasanās election day stream so keep that in mind as you read my reply!
Thereās no alternative to Hasan right now in the left online space.
The beginning of this argument reeks of āthere is no alternative to capitalismā. We do not have to accept things simply because there is no ābetterā popular alternative. This is the argument that Democrats use to bully and denigrate voters.
Organizing 20 people in your local communist book club doesnāt matter if your movement is constantly demonized in the media and never grows. I donāt think some in the left seem to understand how important propaganda is, and yes, even online. Even Lenin worked on newspapers.
Firstly, Lenin and Hasan are worlds apart. Leninās propaganda was hard theory. Hasan is vague āI want things to be betterā. Lenin never shied away from putting his chips down on the table in tough intra-left questions. Hasan doesnāt even address any tough intra-left questions, heās not even at that level. Lenin literally lead the 1905 Revolution after being out of prison for 5 years. Hasan has been posting for more than 5 years and hasnāt really moved the political needle in this country appreciably.
Hasan is the Jon Stewart of anyone thatās left of āprogressivesā. The same non-ideological criticisms of Stewart apply directly to Hasan. Jon Stewart hasnāt done very much to move that needle either. Popular entertainment is important to have people be open to ideas, but it does not equal political activity. Hasan is actually worse than Jon Stewart in this regard because Hasan hasnāt even made his own brand of political rally unlike the lib Jon Stewart.
Organizing history in the US shows you donāt even need propaganda, you just need to meet people where their at and talk to them about what their problems are. āWinning Gen Zā is such a Democrat beltway insider tactic thatās consistently a loser. Charging those with the least experience in the world to change it is quite literally the best way to fail, itās not a surprise that āyoungismā has been the call of the Democratic party on the ground despite having a gerontocracy that controls the party. There is simply no real durable through line from Hasan to making socialism. Heās just a guy people watch.
. Other people canāt afford to be kicked out of the DNC for talking to Palestine protestors like he was.
There is no theory of change or path to power here. You have literally foreclosed that yourself by pointing this out. Hasan is an entertainer, and he softens views but it literally does not translate into power because in our system the left is structurally disenfranchised.
Hasan does not address this. Itās simply hand waved away.
To put this another way, we donāt have a democracy. There has been consistent popular overwhelming majority grass root support for many social welfare programs in the US over the last 30 years, M4A, rescheduling marijuana, etc.
This doesnāt translate into change, because of the structures of our system. Hasan could make 66% of the country believe n socialism overnight and nothing would change because the theory of change that underpins that assumption is wrong about the structures of the US government.
Itās the same problem that Bernie had. His theory of change did not account for the reality of the political structure. Which is why both of his campaigns failed. There was no answer to that, it was simply hoping for the best and ignoring the possibility of the worst rather than having a contingency for it.
For all the hate that you get for people like Jon Stewart or Voldomir Zelenskyy they are literally the logical ends that Hasan can rise to. Thatās pretty much it, and in reality anyone who actually knows Ukranian politics knows that Zelenskyyās personal political views have almost nothing to do with Zelenskyyās decisions anymore because heās so structurally compromised by the Ukranian political arrangement and the geopolitcal arrangement that you could replace him with a random off the street and more or less the same outcomes would occur. So President Hasan would be as libbed up as possible.
Hasan is a great entertainer and but he trafficks in the most basic understandings of shit, thatās what makes him a great entertainer. Thereās nothing happening outside of the basics. The idea that āif only people knewā is not powerful in reality, because people know, people feel it, thatās the whole argument of Marxism the sociological philosophy. In this day and age everyone has the tools and materials to educate themselves for this stuff. Itās not the 20th century where you have to figure out how to get your hands on printed materials of Marx or whoever. This shit is freely available at marxists.org, libcom.org, Wikipedia, etc. The amount of people that go through that is minuscule compared to the amount that watch a Hasan stream.
Hasan is the perfect example of Wittigenstienās Ladder, because the type of person who becomes a ābig boy socialistā through Hasan effectively would agree with criticisms of Hasan despite liking him. Once you start to do actual organizing and actual mutual aid you see how fake the online shit is. The majority of his audience are more involved with his beef with H3 than they are involved with actually doing good works.
Itās great that peopleās personal journey to leftist organizing might have started with Hasan, but thatās a small percentage of the people in his orbit. Hasan himself would be leery of claiming to be some great leftist guy, his party line is the same as ChapoTrapHouse, this isnāt news, this isnāt organizing, this isnāt leftism, this isnāt real, this is entertainment.
A lot of the defensiveness in this thread is literally based on the personal and not the systemic, itās incredibly parasocial and incredibly toxic to the growth of the people who are putting themselves in that position. For many Hasanās worth is a mirror of their own worth, thatās what parasocial relationships are.
A personās class is defined by their relation to labor, not their wealth.
This is literally not true. Like quite literally, even in socialist history this is not a true statement. Leninism particularly had some very funny hijinks about linking wealth to class.
Heās not exploiting labor.
I donāt want to really get into it, but Hasan like every other content creator indirectly exploits the labor that provides the platform that he makes money off of.
Twitch.TV is a stage that is built and maintained by workers working for a Twitch. Those workers are exploited. The stage is a means of production. The artists that use the stage also exploit those workers, because they procure use of the stage. The cool thing about Hasans typical response to this which is the thought terminating cliche of āthere is no ethical consumption under capitalismā is that it by definition has a corollary. If there can be no ethical consumption, there can be no ethical production.
Engels was famously in a very similar situation.
Engelsā factories were all unionized.
Hasan has literally in 2019 after all the āpodcasters donāt pay guests dramaā that he very well knows of given his friends, had exploited people that did free work for him. Thereās controversy about whether Hasan actually pays his mods. Most online personalities are not very forthcoming about how they get help with their content/community management and whether that is properly compensated, Hasan included. For a venture thatās made $12m over 5 years Hasan 100% should be paying every single person that touches anything related to his work without them having to ask, whether itās hourly, piece work, or full time employment.
Hasan is nowhere near Engels in his understanding and treatment of labor.
Iām not sure the people claiming heās a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory.
Most of Hasanās fans and Hasan himself donāt have understand anything about communist / socialist theory or history. This thread at large is a perfect encapsulation of this where the history and theory is bent entirely in the defense of one online entertainer in 2024. I say this as a person who occasionally watches (e.g. election night since I dindāt want to watch broadcast cable and nobody else good had election live streams).
The real problem here is the deification of Hasan and the comparison of him to Marx or Engels thatās done up and down this thread is indicative of the seriousness of the commenters in their understanding of socialism. A lot of these arguments are vibes + socialist bromides, they donāt actually do anything beyond surface level reflexive defense. Nobody actually wants to open the Pandoraās box here because as the famous tweet said āsome of our faves might be implicatedā.
Rutgers and Princeton have an intertwined history, but thatās pretty much it. Rutgers is seen as a good state school and to many itās mostly because it sounds like a private school.
Marx was part of the Young Hegelians. Marx and Engles were part of the Communist League (if not itās literal sun around whom the League revolved), and Marx and Engels were also the founders of the German Workersā Society.
The idea that Marx was a recluse internet style poster with no attachment to real society is a 21st century invention to make vaguely left people feel better about their alienation and a strawman for the right to attack.
Letās start with asking the question: how exactly are you an ally? what are the actual parameters of ally ship here? Do you do mutual aid? Do you voulunteer consistently in your community? Do you do organizing? Do you read theory?
Or do you just nod your head when someone says medicare for all or living wage? If so, why do you think you deserve any kind of accolades for simply vaguely agreeing with (and possibly also parroting) sloganeering?
Or do you post on vaguely leftist sites? If so why do you think you deserve any kind of accolades simply for posting, a recreational activity?
What is it that youāve done besides call yourself a socialist that practically means something? And why is that worthy of praise?
As a political force in the United States there is no left. The left is structurally shut out of power.
If you donāt think the right has message board arguments about what flavor of right wing is better, calling eachother RINO, saying that SS style Nazi guys should be Deus Vult style Nazi guys, or how frens and groypers are cringe or how parroting Mitch McConnell makes someone dumb you just havenāt talked to or seen right wingers talk to each other.
Comparing apples and oranges is the most common thing that happens when this kind of shit pops off because it helps diffuse the actual conversations we could have. You see it all in this thread about how for some people Hasan is a large portion of āthe leftā simply because heās popular and thatās all they know. These people donāt have real world experience, they get their ideas from online. Theyāre no different than Kamala Redditors who thought that everyone was going to vote for Kamala because they were too online and instead there was a red wave.
The reality of these types of conversations is that most online leftists donāt have the theoretical backing to grapple with these types of questions and when the accusations are levied against a popular leftist that makes money off of their popularity itās in their self interest to shut that shit down in any way possible and thatās what you end up seeing.
The more stable, self-sufficient, and financially solvent I became, the more I found myself ostracized by the left
Iām also in the tech sector and Iāve been part of local leftist organization. From direct mutual aid to anarchist crust punks to soup kitchens to PSL, Iāve literally never had a problem. Not to turn this into Blind dot com, but my net worth is ~3x the US median.
The difference between Hasan and I, is that Hasan is a poster boy for the left that is making money off of being a poster boy for the left. Nobody is āpocket watchingā you as a rando online or in person. Nobody is putting you on trial for your success. That argument is literally the same argument that Elon Musk and other Billionaires make about being punished for their success.
If youāre attempting to show your class traitor bona fides and defending Hasan as one at the same time, but itās sounding a lot more like solidarity with the moneyed class. Your resentment is showing.
Wearing decent clothes would get me side-eyed by those who insist on black bloc.
Also wtf does this even mean? People donāt dress black bloc for every day dude.
If you want to be lauded for your material success in a capitalist system perhaps you should just be a capitalist?
Lol this is a misuse of statistics to make it look like Hasan isnāt rich. The median US net worth is roughly $200,000. That means 50% of people have less than $200k of net worth, and remember itās not real money. It means liquidating all of your assets.
Hasan makes the median net worth of an American in one month on Twitch subs alone (from the Twitch leaks where he was the 13th most paid on the site at ~$200k and thatās just one of his income streams). Which means he makes the average US net worth in 5. Using just his house price as his ānet worthā is laughable.
Using the Twitch leaks numbers, Hasan bought his house in 2021. Twitch leaks were about 2019-2022. If he makes $200k since 2019 (which is a low estimate because his line go up), heās made $12,000,000 off of Twitch alone. He can arguably buy 4 of that same house cash and carry.
I get it, heās a cool guy, but are we really gonna pretend here that heās living some life comparable to normal people when heās made $12 million in 5 years? Heās certainly better than most of his peers (other rich people) since you could argue thereās minimal direct exploitation (indirect exploitation is a whole other argument, and given that people hate nuance Iām not gonna bother to make it), but letās not pretend heās living the same type of life.
thatās the fake substack made by some rando the day he was arrested.
His actual substack exists and has historical proof
https://substack.com/@anotherdayanotherplay
Proof this was the real one.
https://substack.com/@gurwinder/note/c-80783414