US 2010: “We’ve created and incentivised this gigantic drag net of information based on insecure protocols, private partnership deals, FISA court orders, and outright black budget illegality”

US 2024: “Pweeze 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 what’s happening in the drag net and they can leverage that information to compromise our idiot elites.”

I think “Hasan exposes people to leftist ideas” is great and all, but your argument has the following lynch pin:

The right has a pipeline that’s 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:

1. People need to “hear this stuff” – which fine I agree with.
2. “hearing stuff” on the left translates to the same outcomes that “hearing stuff” on the right does. – This is where you lose me.

The Right has it easy. It’s 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 people’s suffering exist. The right doesn’t actually need people to continue it’s 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 there’s 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 it’s 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, that’s 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 doesn’t 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.

“Roganism” will never deliver these things. In fact “Roganism” will simply get you a bunch of consumers. The only way that “Roganism” 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 isn’t really responsible for any of this, he’s an entertainer. He’s a good entertainer, he has okay politics. But that’s it, there’s 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 “the left”, we’re doing the same type of spending as we criticize the DNC for. Hasan is our Beyonce concert, our Oprah interview, it’s just spread out over the whole year. That didn’t 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 “message” or “policy” or any desire to help people in any realistic way that isn’t a spreadsheet, and it’s stupid that they paid for Beyonce thinking it will get them over the line. Leftists don’t have a unified platform and don’t even have a machine, but it’s smart that we “pay” for Hasan? That’s really the argument that I’m reading from all this:

1. Hasan streams
2. Somebody thinks yeah medicare for all
3. ???
4. ???
5. ???
6. politically viable leftism in the US

It’s the same argument:

1. Everyone has a brat summer
2. Oprah fumbles Kamala thru a question
3. Beyonce performs
4. ???
5. ???
6. ???
7. Democrats win.

I think one thing a lot of Westerners don’t 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 it’s gig work, because of the same exact reason that “Roganism” works. Hasan’s 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? It’s really easy to say that, it’s 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 doesn’t 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.

It depends on how the program works. If SteamOS works like Android then yeah we might be cooked on the hardware support. If SteamOS works like a normal linux distro/OS we’ll get more support.

In practice this is a good thing because most of the parts of SteamOS are open source, meaning that as long as you don’t have a device with a locked bootloader you’d be able to run comparable OS simply using all the software that’s bundled in Steam OS.

If you’re 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.

That’s 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 doesn’t make a lot of sense in the language of Marxism. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is effectively a literary review of “how we got here” and such a definition of class excludes classes of feudalism which are covered in that work. Not only that but a peasant’s 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 wasn’t 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 “normal people” that were difficult to qualify or deemed morally degenerate by various authors were just put into the lumpen space. It wasn’t until the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords took a look around and said the normal people around us don’t fit into pure “proletarian” definitions. That begged the question of “does this mean that communism is doomed?”. 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 doesn’t 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 (Marx’s 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 “There’s no ethical consumption”. The corollary here is that there’s 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 I’ll just move on.

This whole thread is weird too online gossip if you haven’t noticed.

I was just correcting an incorrect sentiment in this post that having wealth means you can’t be on the side of the working class.

This is true, however this is actually hard to prove, and denying Hasan’s 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, what’s happening in much of this thread is denying those conversations via thought terminating cliches but from the left, because many see this as a “grand posting battle”. I’m not advocating that we have to game out a percentage of Hasan good or Hasan bad, I’m 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 it’s my view that if Hasan is indeed a “fellow traveler” and someone who people learn “the left”/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 Hasan’s election day stream so keep that in mind as you read my reply!

There’s no alternative to Hasan right now in the left online space.

The beginning of this argument reeks of “there is no alternative to capitalism”. We do not have to accept things simply because there is no “better” popular alternative. This is the argument that Democrats use to bully and denigrate voters.

Organizing 20 people in your local communist book club doesn’t matter if your movement is constantly demonized in the media and never grows. I don’t 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. Lenin’s propaganda was hard theory. Hasan is vague “I want things to be better”. Lenin never shied away from putting his chips down on the table in tough intra-left questions. Hasan doesn’t even address any tough intra-left questions, he’s 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 hasn’t really moved the political needle in this country appreciably.

Hasan is the Jon Stewart of anyone that’s left of “progressives”. The same non-ideological criticisms of Stewart apply directly to Hasan. Jon Stewart hasn’t 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 hasn’t even made his own brand of political rally unlike the lib Jon Stewart.

Organizing history in the US shows you don’t even need propaganda, you just need to meet people where their at and talk to them about what their problems are. “Winning Gen Z” is such a Democrat beltway insider tactic that’s consistently a loser. Charging those with the least experience in the world to change it is quite literally the best way to fail, it’s not a surprise that “youngism” 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. He’s just a guy people watch.

. Other people can’t 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. It’s simply hand waved away.

To put this another way, we don’t 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 doesn’t 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.

It’s 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. That’s pretty much it, and in reality anyone who actually knows Ukranian politics knows that Zelenskyy’s personal political views have almost nothing to do with Zelenskyy’s decisions anymore because he’s 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, that’s what makes him a great entertainer. There’s nothing happening outside of the basics. The idea that “if only people knew” is not powerful in reality, because people know, people feel it, that’s 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. It’s 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 Wittigenstien’s Ladder, because the type of person who becomes a “big boy socialist” 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.

It’s great that people’s personal journey to leftist organizing might have started with Hasan, but that’s 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 isn’t news, this isn’t organizing, this isn’t leftism, this isn’t real, this is entertainment.

A lot of the defensiveness in this thread is literally based on the personal and not the systemic, it’s incredibly parasocial and incredibly toxic to the growth of the people who are putting themselves in that position. For many Hasan’s worth is a mirror of their own worth, that’s what parasocial relationships are.

A person’s 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.

He’s not exploiting labor.

I don’t 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 “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” 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.

Engels’ factories were all unionized.

Hasan has literally in 2019 after all the “podcasters don’t pay guests drama” that he very well knows of given his friends, had exploited people that did free work for him. There’s 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 that’s 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 it’s hourly, piece work, or full time employment.

Hasan is nowhere near Engels in his understanding and treatment of labor.

I’m not sure the people claiming he’s a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory.

Most of Hasan’s fans and Hasan himself don’t 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 dind’t 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 that’s 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 don’t actually do anything beyond surface level reflexive defense. Nobody actually wants to open the Pandora’s box here because as the famous tweet said “some of our faves might be implicated”.

Rutgers and Princeton have an intertwined history, but that’s pretty much it. Rutgers is seen as a good state school and to many it’s 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 it’s literal sun around whom the League revolved), and Marx and Engels were also the founders of the German Workers’ 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.

Let’s 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 you’ve 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 don’t 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 haven’t 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 “the left” simply because he’s popular and that’s all they know. These people don’t have real world experience, they get their ideas from online. They’re 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 don’t 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 it’s in their self interest to shut that shit down in any way possible and that’s what you end up seeing.

The more stable, self-sufficient, and financially solvent I became, the more I found myself ostracized by the left

I’m also in the tech sector and I’ve been part of local leftist organization. From direct mutual aid to anarchist crust punks to soup kitchens to PSL, I’ve 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 “pocket watching” 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 you’re attempting to show your class traitor bona fides and defending Hasan as one at the same time, but it’s 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 don’t 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 isn’t rich. The median US net worth is roughly $200,000. That means 50% of people have less than $200k of net worth, and remember it’s 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 that’s just one of his income streams). Which means he makes the average US net worth in 5. Using just his house price as his “net worth” 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), he’s made $12,000,000 off of Twitch alone. He can arguably buy 4 of that same house cash and carry.

I get it, he’s a cool guy, but are we really gonna pretend here that he’s living some life comparable to normal people when he’s made $12 million in 5 years? He’s certainly better than most of his peers (other rich people) since you could argue there’s minimal direct exploitation (indirect exploitation is a whole other argument, and given that people hate nuance I’m not gonna bother to make it), but let’s not pretend he’s living the same type of life.

Hasan literally told Business Insider that he wanted to move to LA because of fucking Entourage.

Likewise yeah people in their 20s-30s move to cities to chill, but not everyone moves to LA or NY.

Remember how libs were rehabbing GWB but then GWB never endorsed, and they got really mad?

We all know why!!! It’s because GWB is a Russian asset, why else would he invite Putin to a high school in Crawford Texas unless Putin had compromat dizinformatsiya on him in 2001. DO NOT LOOK UP WHEN PUTIN BECAME PRESIDENT THAT IS NOT RELEVANT!!! COMPOMAT! DISINFORMATSIYA!

Yeah TBH I was with him until that point.

Evil Russia is botting on lemmy dot ml to reach a smidgen of the 60K MAU who are mostly already deluded nerds into not supporting Hasan on twitch dot tv a site of 240M MAU for geopolitical reasons of 20 dimensional chess.

Yeah the problem with living in capitalist hellworld at the heart of the empire is that you have two separated insular communities of leftists that are knife fighting rings. One in meetings and one on message boards, and they frequently know nothing about each other.

While the meetings communists sometimes eke out wins like Kshama Sawant, they often struggle to connect to the message board communists who really should be their base. Meanwhile both struggle to connect to society at large.

What’s really funny is that most meetings communists I know locally essentially think of him in essentially the same way message board communists think of AOC. Most meetings communists cannot stand his level of yadda yadda when pressed on any specifics he often just goes more general and says things like ‘I just want everyone to have healthcare bro’.

Because this is a plain instance of him not being a class traitor to further his own career and desires.

The reality of the “stop pocket watching” argument that Hasan has successfully deployed on his fans and friends is that it’s the same argument every rich person pulls out when you question how they spend their money and what that practically says about their place and ideas for society at large.

My argument isn’t that “people shouldn’t live in LA” (okay fine maybe it is a little). My argument is that Hasan made the same choice that every influencer makes.

Beyond the very obvious influencer argument, how exactly do you think that upper middle class comes to support capitalism as a whole? They get addicted to their level of consumption like every wealthy class has done for millennia.

So the underlying argument there isn’t “Hasan doesn’t deserve nice things”, it’s that “Hasan’s appetite for nice things is a form of class expression” and there is a point of where that class expression and the addiction to consumption overrides any “do socialism” argument that you say on stream.

This is literally how the nomenklatura got fat in the USSR, they didn’t have streams but they had their local, national, and general assembly soviets. Every post-Soviet person knows an uncle who was a party apparatchik and stopped saying “do socialism” the moment the wall came down, and he was one out of maybe two/three guys in your whole extended family who happened to have a car prior to 1995. I have 3 of such uncles and 2 of them aren’t even blood relatives.

Y’all are getting wrecked by the same attitudes that wrecked the USSR and y’all don’t even have state capitalism with socialist characteristics.

The real problem here is that Hasan doesn’t admit these things. Hasan can’t admit these things because he doesn’t know these things. Hasan is very limited in his knowledge of “socialism”, he’s a guy who just says shit on stream. Being a class traitor is a cool coat he wears along with all his other cool coats.

I struggle to even call myself a class traitor despite the fact that I have Eastern European thrift embedded so deeply in my veins that I live way below my means. Guess what class expression doesn’t stop there. Being thrifty doesn’t stop you from being compromised by your class. That money doesn’t sit under my mattress it’s invested, which means I’m in a class of people who not only will have private money for retirement but I’m invested in the outcomes of the market like every upper middle class person.

So I’m sorry that I don’t buy the whole class traitor shit, because neither the fans giving him that title nor he can actually untangle and explain his place in the world beyond saying “stop pocket watching”. It’s one thing to call yourself a class traitor because you bought a cool eat the rich shirt, it’s another thing to actually take inventory of your life and apply socialist theory to figure that out.

Shame that seriously asking is so hard to distinguish from trolling at this point.

Common-L among left-ish Lemmy instances when you start noticing the paint chipping off of their golden idols.