this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024

56 points (70.6% liked)

Asklemmy

44152 readers

1283 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Can anyone help me understand why Hasan Piker is so popular in leftist political spaces despite his immense privilege? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

145 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This guy's dad is the former VP of a multibillion dollar Turkish conglomerate, as well as the secretary of a government department. Mom and Dad were able to fly to their other home in NJ to give birth so he'd get US citizenship. His uncle is the founder and owner of TYT Media and gave him his media career. He went to Rutgers. He lives in a multimillion dollar mansion in the Hollywood Hills. This is by definition not the kind of person who can be a voice of the People. Saying "I recognize my privilege" over and over, while living his lifestyle, doesn't negate his privilege and complete lack of real-life experience outside of the curated garden of the wealthy. He gets paid obscene amounts of cash to sit in his bedroom and word-vomit for 9 hours a day. Why are his unending opinions taken so seriously? He gives me strong controlled opposition vibes.

Edit: Thank you all for this discussion. I learned a lot.

(page 2) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

His class shouldn't matter ultimately.

However, his superficial and putrid understanding of anything regarding politics or the world in infuriating. At one point he was simping hard for Russia's invasion of Ukraine repeating verbatim rt talking points.

I loathe this man more than I hate Joe Rogan. Joe is an imbecile, through and through. Hasan, on the other hand, supposedly has a poli Sci degree. He knows what he's doing and it's disgusting

Edit : I don't have time to go into every fact check of the mountain of lies he spews. The guy has never opened a book in his life and spends all day reading Twitter. Some great intellectual.

Willymac does a good breakdown on yt:

Hasan sucks

Ukrainians react to Hasan (yt) :

Ukrainians react

He's such a joke

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate?

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

A person's class is defined by their relation to labor, not their wealth. He's not exploiting labor. I'm not sure the people claiming he's a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory. Engels was famously in a very similar situation.

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The revolution will not have a channel on youtube.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Hasan occupies a niche within the broad "leftist" umbrella niche within the West. Unlike many breadtubers, he actually doesn't serve as much of a barrier for further leftist movement (see: Vaush, Destiny, etc.). He is privledged, but so was Engels. Hasan certainly is no Engels, but he does serve a useful role in radicalizing liberals towards the Left, like how he vocally combats the nonsense usage of the word "tankie" trendy among liberals these days.

Hasan is a pundit at the end of the day, and isn't bringing about the revolution, and he is definitely more of a USophile than he should be, but he is better than most leftist commentators and helps serve as a conveyor to the left of himself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Thank you for a nuanced reply. When you put it this way, I can see why many listeners find value in his content. I worked another shift today with him constantly droning in the background and I think my opinion is largely being colored by his presentation style, and my own distaste for "streamers" and "react culture" in general, with his aforementioned privilege issues now coming in third.

His comments about people working "real" jobs having an easier time of it than he does certainly rubbed me the wrong way, though, and his response when called out on it was more of the exact same "BROOO WHAT ARE YOU STUPID? THATS NOT WHAT I MEANT! OK!?" that his streams are full of.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago

'This person's not allowed to do the right thing, because he was born wrong.'

Uh huh.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh screw off with this bullshit. So pathetic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks for your contribution to the discussion, very insightful.

[+] [email protected] -10 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

These are bot account folks. There's been a surge of attacks against Hasan by the right and russian propaganda machine. They are opening the flood gates to undermine all the remaining progressive influencers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's a new one, I've never been accused of being a bot for having an unpopular viewpoint before! You're just full of surprises, aren't you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I’ve never been accused of being a bot for having an unpopular viewpoint before!

Ah, you get used to it pretty quickly.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

I've never listened to him for more than a few seconds. He gives me shyster vibes and I don't need a pundit to tell me everything is shit.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I think you have an extremely online view of "leftist political spaces" because I have never even heard this guy's name mentioned in any real life context, and I've been a very politically active communist since I was a teenager.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

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'.

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

There's nothing "leftist" about Piker, no matter what he chooses to call himself. People need to pay attention to what he does, not what he says.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

People need to pay attention to what he does, not what he says.

...He's a pundit. What he does is pick opinions and put them in front of his audience. He seems to have much better opinions than most Americans and is pretty good at spreading them. That's useful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What does he do

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Addition: his father is a founding member of a right wing party in Turkey

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I'll state this: I know of this person in name only.

He's a hypocrite. It's as simple as that. His popularity is probably derived from the novelty of a member of the upper class agreeing with the lower classes and his ability to entertain them. It gives those that belong to the lower class hope of change being enacted by those with capital. The Wikipedia page states he brought a $2.7 million USD mansion. He has access to capital, and what does he do? Asks others to donate to 'worthy' causes whilst accruing more capital for his own vested, personal vanity projects?

From what I've read he is not an ally. He's an entertainer. The capitalist system is able to create products that espouse anti-capitalist ideas. This is just another such product. It's not controlled opposition. It's just an individual who's found himself the owner of a sought after product. Just another capitalist.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's not very much for a house in LA

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Okay let's do some introspection, why does Hasan Piker need to live in LA?

He could live in La Puente which has a median sale price of $700k, 20 miles from downtown LA, but for some reason he moved to LA.

It's kind-of odd you know? That basically once a streamer, podcaster, or one of these online personalities makes it big they often move to like LA or NYC. Why is that? Why don't they move to Nabraska or something? It's kind of weird that there's this seeming class of people (new media people making it big) that have an interest in moving to some of the most expensive areas of the country that seemingly have a conglomeration of other people who are part of their class.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

once a streamer, podcaster, or one of these online personalities makes it big they often move to like LA or NYC. Why is that?

That's not a streamer thing, that's an almost everyone thing. Tons of people move to cities as soon as they can afford it, tons of those who don't stay where they are in no small part because it's less expensive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What the fuck does any of that matter. How are you about to say someone shouldn't live where they want because its expensive and they can afford it? Nebraska fucking sucks BTW.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

Never heard of him.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

As long as you don't exploit workers there nothing wrong in having money. You probably know that Engels was rich - and to be honest he did exploit workers (owned a textile factory or something). Was he, by your definition, the kind of person who can be a voice of the people?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 weeks ago

What's with the identity politics man? Does what he says makes sense or not? Don't tell me you won't listen to rich white people when they make sense because they're rich and white.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 weeks ago

You can advocate for hungry people after eating a meal. You can advocate fornsex worker rights even if you are a virgin.

You can't tell people you are "working class" if you're rich. You can't advocate for punishing day people while pretending to be straight.

It is not complicated.

load more comments