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mutters “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” to myself for the 69420th time today

“haters” is succinct.

“Haters” is a thought-terminating cliche.

One of my aims is not to get myself socially ostracized for giving my real opinions on the DPRK before I’ve had time to let people understand that I am a kind, rational, well-adjusted person.

This fixation on being an AES Defender is, again, a terminally online and useless view of how agitation works and I think it’s good that Hasan does not do that.

The rapport you lose is more valuable than being honest for honesty’s sake. You do not have exclusive control over the conversation, nor are people required to hear you out or talk to you again. These are basic social skills, you speak to your audience, present phrasing favorable to their ideals, and find common ground.

Lying to people has its own detriments, especially when you don’t treat agitation like a condescending game of manipulation and just talk to people like a person.

You want to know what another basic axiom of communication is? Salience. If something doesn’t matter, don’t bother with it, and your opinion on the internal politics of the DPRK overwhelmingly don’t matter, so you should focus on things that do. Because again, I’m not trying to argue that Hasan isn’t enough of an AES Defender, here I will again give him credit because he understands this: Do you think the DPRK is a shitty tinpot dictatorship? Doesn’t matter, the sanctions are still barbaric and still objectively serving the purpose of hurting the most vulnerable people in the country. Even if you feel passionately about the government in the DPRK changing because you want people to do better, US imperial aggression is not the way to accomplish that. That is true and in no way disingenuous because we also endorse this line of thinking for imperialized countries that have obviously backward and repressive governments like Iran, where the government nonetheless needs to get nukes as quickly as possible.

Also, even genuine liberals with mostly-liberal audiences like AOC make this argument some of the time (she recently did with Cuba).

This is basically Hasan’s position and I think that it’s perfectly fair. It also explains my point here, that there is no need to be a tailist to try to pander to shitlibs when you can just focus on the more agreeable and salient points and work from there (or rely on others to work from there, if we’re doing this pipeline thing, but that requires not punching left!)

You out here quoting one line from a pamphlet released in 1848 and treating it like scripture. Oppose book worship.

I’m using a quote as a thesis statement for an argument, rather like you are. While we shouldn’t worship books, there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory, and Hasan would do well to actually fucking read Lenin instead of just quote-mine him not because I want him to put the economic tables from Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism on screen and scream at chat to read it, but because he would have a better understanding of where it would be useful to channel his efforts.

Mind you, if he disagrees with Lenin, that’s fine and Lenin was wrong about things, but his distortions of Lenin make any sort of real conversation about Marxism more difficult. He should attack Lenin’s positions as Hasan rather than pretend to represent Lenin’s positions in order to attack Lenin’s actual positions.

I don’t know where you live, but here in the imperial core, people’s political education is that Stalin killed a quadrillion people and that you get immediately executed for watching western movies in the DPRK. This is inseparable in their minds from your ideology. But yeah, these people would most certainly engage meaningfully with Marxist theory without addressing that…unless you plan on peanut butter pilling them by not naming what belief system your ideas originate from?

I live in America. You don’t need to get into endless historical litigations to make these points and you frankly usually will not get anywhere if you get caught up in arguing about fucking Stalin. It’s not “peanut butter pilling them” (this is such a gross turn of phrase to me, though I can’t explain why) to just argue on the basis of extremely basic and simple principles. e.g.: “Do you want a society where decisions are made by the majority of people or a minority of people? No matter what you do, on a large scale it is going to be one or the other, so which do you think is better for us?” etc. You don’t typically have conversations by saying:

Hello, I uphold the Immortal Science of Marxism-Leninism with the incorporation of Mao Zedong Thought and Xi Jinping Thought, why don’t you? I need you to sign right here with an endorsement of every death that Stalin is responsible for, which by the way you are affirming is a figure of maybe one quarter the number promoted in popular culture, and pledge to kill any kulak you see, and on the next page I need to you to sign the same for every single person Mao killed, which is more like a fifth of the popular figure, and then initial that the Cultural Revolution was cool and so was the Great Leap Forward and that you personally aspire to destroy the Four Olds as a New Red Guard, but also not do that because we’re on SWCC now and actually here are those policies, but the position on imperialist-running-dog-occupied Formosa and the necessity of its takeover is still the same. What? No, it’s just a few more, we have Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Yugoslavia, Albania, Spain (supporting the Stalinist faction of communists, of course), East Germany, Poland, and here I want you to sign on to Juche and, well, don’t worry about reading those texts, we just need you to be ready to man the artillery to bombard Seoul if you’re ever visiting the DPRK or maybe help with ICBM targeting if you’re going to be staying in any major population centers here in the US. Oh, and . . .

(The specifics of anything said in the text there don’t really matter, just the general idea)

I just argue in favor of democracy and against capitalism, imperialism, and chauvinism. It’s really quite simple.

And if they support Marxist principles but have serious historical misconceptions? There are ways of approaching that, but overall it just doesn’t matter that much if you can get them on your side for a living domestic political project.

Seriously, have you actually talked to your reactionary or turbolib peers IRL about this stuff?

Yes, I have, and it’s mostly gone well for me, because I focus on what is salient. I’ve played an instrumental part in the radicalization of multiple “turbolibs” and I’m able to at least cow reactionaries. Mostly I focus on dealing with libs and people who have chud backgrounds but are currently “apolitical” or “centrist” types, because the real chuds tend to operate in extreme bad faith, so persuading them isn’t really on the table because they have no interest in the truth and are just using the conversation as a performance anyway. I don’t think there’s much to do with them except via enculturation, at least in my circumstances, and if I wanted to take an approach of building rapport, I’m still not going to do it by lying to them (and I have done this before, though that project got interrupted by outside circumstances).

You are the one who comes across as terminally online. What if we had all entertainers recite our holy scripture in their performances?

I agree, that character you invented in your head sounds like a useless fool, but I didn’t say that. While it might be good for him to make more of an effort now and then to do little lessons on political theory, you’re the one who has emphasized that more than I have. My problem is with his negative inclusions, not positive things that he has excluded.

I would like to gently encourage you to do some reflection, since you’re the one saying we should follow the example of groypers rather than actual socialists when figuring out how to spread class consciousness among the masses.

Edit: I will add, since I just saw the announcement, that I think him participating in the Cuba Flotilla is fantastic and I’ll eagerly be watching all of his coverage of it.

I think you’re both assuming antagonism because tone is lost in text.

You both have really good points imo. At the end of the day I’ll err on the side of taking whatever small wins we can get. I was radicalized the through some inane and stupid stuff, literally anti-capitalist memes on Reddit. And if there’s someone out there saying capitalism is bad and the US is an evil empire, that’s a strength I want to build on.

This was not Lenin’s position, and it’s the same bullshit false dichotomy I’ve seen him bring up before

Not claiming this, just voicing what I think Hasan is trying to do. Obviously, Hasan is not well read on Lenin.

but the problem is that there is no building a socialist movement on false pretenses

Right, but is Hasan actually involved with building any sort of socialist movement? No serious Marxist claims him as a thought leader, nor is he trying to lead a vanguard party. He’s essentially talking out his ass while trying to kill off common brainworms about Marxism that didn’t exist in earlier revolutionaries’ times.

and I have repeatedly seen the contempt with which he treats people representing the actual revolutionary nature of Marxism. You can see in his chat in any such instance that he has trained his community very well to go “based” “chad” at whatever image of select revolutionaries but to reject the substance of their thought and call people with a basic understanding “ultras.”

He’s conditioning people’s first reaction upon seeing references to Marxist leaders to be “hell yeah!” Unsure if that was supposed to be an example of contempt, but I wouldn’t call it that, maybe disregard or ignorance. I would not characterize him as training people to reject the substance of Marxist thought, given he tells people to read theory all the time (despite not having done so himself)

Using quote-mining to misrepresent Lenin while sneering at his actual positions is not the way to accomplish this.

My point is that even empty, positive references to Lenin, AES countries, etc. are net beneficial because his value does not come from education, it comes from debunking obvious slander and destigmatizing Marxist words, countries, leaders.

There are many things that you can do, of which probably the easiest pitch is to simply explain in plain English some of theoretical basis of Marxist political philosophy,

Trust me, you and I both wish he would present actual theory on stream. Despite my defense of him, I do not think his streams are good place to go for serious political education, but that is very much not his audience. His audience wants to casually consume the news with leftish commentary and humor.

I think this is where our fundamental disagreement comes from. You are looking for him to be more serious, but that is not what his audience is there for. Hasan’s streams are entertainment, and he is closer to Bill Burr or Dan Carlin than even the Citations Needed guys, let alone any real leader. As far as entertainment goes, I cannot find any contemporary figure that has a more positive impact given how much he has done to destigmatize AES and Marxism.

You seem to evaluate him as if he intends to be as serious as you want him to be, which I think lends itself to seeing him in an uncharitable light. His job is to make the masses more receptive to us. Our job is to educate. His popularity is doing us a huge favor.

Nonetheless, I will if you need me to.

Is this a jab at me? No need to insult me because I don’t think a twitch streamer is the heir apparent to Lenin.