Apologies in advance for further inundating everybody’s headspace with celebrity slop, but I wanted to blab about this:
I generally have no faith in public personalities to hold any convictions at all, so it has been refreshing for Hasan to adhere to his position against voting for Gruesome Newscum. I don’t at all mean to imply that he’s perfect, or that people should look to him as a leader in any respect, it’s just nice to see something like that happening and getting broad exposure. Feels good.
Exactly this. He’s not “hiding his power level”, he’s playing a role. The role is media personality that explains Marxism to the masses in a digestible way, and applies a general left perspective to current events. He mainly does news commentary, and in a world where news media doesn’t investigate or think critically, it’s a valuable vector for propaganda.
The Hasan hater cohort here wants Hasan to parrot our party line to a T.
If you want Marxist theory explained to you in a video format, Hakim and JT Chapman already do a much better job of that. Does Hasan understand the culture of AES countries well enough to present their history or political systems as effectively as Luna Oi, Lady Izdihar, or Yugopnik? Will he provide a more informed economic analysis than Michael Hudson or Richard Wolff? Is he going to be more detailed than Ben Norton at covering current affairs from an anti-imperialist perspective? Can he put together a news program as good as Breakthrough News?
No!
His niche is covering current events in an interactive and humorous way in order to break normies of their anti-AES and anti-communist brainworms.
His audience is mostly people who have been fed nothing but western propaganda their entire lives, usually cloaked in advocacy for free healthcare, vague anti-warism, and opposition to overt racism.
The bits of idealistic liberalism he often regurgitates serve as the peanut butter required for baby leftists in the west to swallow the pills that end up shattering their naïve worldview.
Hasan understands that if you only run defense for socialist countries, libs will immediately dismiss what you have to say as “shilling for authoritarianism” and never consider the rest of your message.
His content is simply not for us. He is shitposting in a strategic way that lets him build a big audience and walk it down the road towards Marxism. Elevating him to be the voice of the vanguard is artificially caps the pipeline. Us being critical of him supports his role by making him appear relatively nuanced to those libs. Eventually they will outgrow his content and join our ranks.
I have him on for hours a day and it’s not out of animosity. I give him credit and indeed have in this thread, writing all critics off as “haters” is extremely parasocial behavior.
And this is garbage. Communists disdain to hide their aims and your idea about how left-radicalization works – besides being condescending to the point of misanthropy – is completely failing to appreciate the fundamental differences between Marxists and the irony-poisoned, nihilistic freaks on the extreme right, for whom recruitment based on lies makes more sense.
This isn’t the problem and if being a hardline socialist remotely resembles this in your view, then your mindset is totally backwards. I don’t give a shit about him not cheerleading for whichever country hard enough, that’s such a terminally online view of what politics is, I care about him misrepresenting Marxist theory and thereby hampering people’s political education beyond receiving a laundry list of berniecrat and antizionist talking points.
Then what are you even complaining about? I’m helping him, right?
detractors, people who dont like him, overzealous critics, whatever you want to call it. “haters” is succinct.
When you read the letter and not the spirit of the text. Indeed, we do not hide our aims: to build a stateless, classless, moneyless society. 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. 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.
Seriously, have you actually talked to your reactionary or turbolib peers IRL about this stuff? You out here quoting one line from a pamphlet released in 1848 and treating it like scripture. Oppose book worship.
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?
Clearing the minefields that come up in every conversation about socialism is a major assist in us being able to proliferate our views. Again, Hasan is not an expert in Marxism, why do you expect him to do your work for you? Do you really think him giving an overview of demcent or the mass line with these brainworms still intact would have any utility?
You are the one who comes across as terminally online. What if we had all entertainers recite our holy scripture in their performances? Surely, that would result in socialism being built and not cause people to watch other shit.
I’m trying to have a polite discussion about a popular media figure’s effect on the public consciousness. Did I say something to set you off? I have no idea why you are being so antagonistic.
Leftists need a meta-organizing strategy lmao. This is the most “loose binding coalition”-ass set of ideologies that just turns into a damn circular firing squad at any given moment.
Want to feed the homeless? Cool FNB and your local PSL efforts can collab, stay 30 feet apart, maybe some go-betweens can coordinate resource sharing, but this constant bickering and shitting on each other is beyond enervating and “aesthetic online leftism” is nothing but a gift to the pedophile-porky class.
The thing about “solidarity” is it’s easier to feel connected to people from mutual approbation and caring. Western Leftism (especially online) is the opposite. But the West is largely a set of countries who would prefer some Amazon wage-slave run over the neighbor’s pet dog to get their package five seconds sooner, so who fucking cares. Burn it to the ground.
Problem is that posting online is easy and organizing is hard. Online, everyone wants to show off how smart, righteous, and correct they are for what they believe.
The truth of the matter is, what you believe does not matter so much as what you do.
Quite frankly, I do not believe there is any such thing as a cohesive left. We will have momentary alignment in struggles, which we will need to organize to meet the challenges of. Through the practice of struggle, practices will reveal themselves to be more effective than others, and certain theoretical ideas will prove themselves more useful for engaging in struggle. When operational considerations force your hand, rigid ideology will take a back seat to pragmatism.
💯
mutters “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” to myself for the 69420th time today
If that’s his role then, given how badly he misrepresents theory, he should pack it in. Seriously, twisting Lenin to justify voting democrat? That’s pretty egregious.