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Hasan Piker interviews Cuban journalist
(thelemmy.club)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43545612
cross-posted from: https://expressional.social/users/Peter_Link/statuses/116111218052321484
Saw this on Facebook
https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2703083266
#BellyOfTheBeast's Liv Oliva Fernández #Interview with #HasanPiker#Cuba #NuestraAméricaFlotilla
#OilForCuba!
#EndTheBlockadeEmbargo
#CubaSolidarity
#LetCubaLive
#EndSanctionsAgainstCuba #OffTheList
#VivaCuba #CubaSí #AbajoElBloqueo #SolidaridadConCuba
#PetróleoParaCuba
#LatinAmerica #Caribbean
#news #politics #USpol #BellyOfTheBeast
@cuba
Maybe you're using the word differently than I understand it, but in my understanding of it, he does not appear like an opportunist. He appears to me like someone whose heart is in the right place, who started moving left around the same time some of the rest of those in the US were doing so, but is in a way a victim of his own success.
The nature of his position will implicitly motivate him to do a certain amount of watering down, holding back, and courting mass appeal over taking unpopular principled stances, in order to stay popular, grow in viewership, and avoid being deplatformed; in other words, the nature of his position works to stunt his own political growth. Suppose, for example, that some principled MLs really got through to him in a big way and he started talking like one, framing everything through an ML lens, defending AES states boldly and blatantly as successful socialist projects, and so on. Would Twitch even allow that, given his audience size and scope of influence? Would his audience allow that or would it start shrinking and turning on him? Would any value from him being positioned where he is to drag people away from the far right become weakened as a result of him being "left" to an unacceptable degree?
The important question to me is, is he actively harming people's ability to move past his positions to principled ML ones? Or is he helping pipeline them, whether intentionally or not? If he's doing more corralling than pipelining, that's a problem for the USian left and others that he reaches. But if he's helping pipeline, while staying wishy washy liberal enough to avoid getting deplatformed, that can have value.
He's not the ideal, but I think it's important to be clear on whether he's overall "not good enough" or "actively harmful", which is a difference.
I am not saying he is a malicious actor; it could be that, or just a genuine failure on his part to understand. An Opportunist can also mean those who sacrifice long-term gains or principles to gain short-term gains, an example would be Bernstein. In a sense, impatient. It should not even be an argument at this point. Hasan has said it multiple times that he believes that the Proletariat (in the United States) is incapable of real revolutionary political struggle; he instead pushes for the incremental approach to 'transforming' (somehow) the Democratic Party internally to serve as a vehicle for socialist implementation. Somehow, instead of educating, exposing to the proletariat what Socialism really is; he wants to conflate it with simply "Plowing the roads", "running the trains"; as if people themselves cannot understand their class interest inherently lol. I apologize if I seem mad, it's just crazy to think there is still an argument when he himself will admit revisionist tendencies- and openly too.
Well that makes more sense to me. Again, wasn't sure what definition you were using.
The problem is, and this is something I thought about mentioning in response to Red_Scare saying "I shouldn’t have said anything, I know nothing about internet personalities" as a way of being understanding about it: people like Hasan stream for hours on a regular basis. It's genuinely hard to keep up with what exactly they are doing and profile them accurately unless they say or do super obvious problematic stuff that's easy to point to and is impossible to argue as meaning anything else in context.
Like part of why I've been careful in how I chime in here is because even though I've watched some recordings of him at various times, it's a drop in the bucket next to the entire picture of it. So maybe I'm being way too forgiving on account of not having seen enough, or not watching the right moments to pick up on what you're picking up on. I may have seen other facets of him and got a picture that would cause me to have a higher opinion of him.
For example, I know from things I have seen that he does have people who will take what he says out of context and there are times he's gone to great lengths to address misrepresentations (like literally hours of going over stuff, which is kind of absurd to me). This does not mean you're wrong about him, but it's one of the reasons I am perhaps more wary of painting him in a way that I would consider means we should be outright recommending people avoid him.
The content form of it also makes it hard to break down what these kind of people are saying in detail and do responses to it from a more ML perspective. We can link a NYT article here and do a response in the process that goes over its reactionary, colonizer nonsense. It's hard to do that with somebody who's going on for hours.
I honestly don't know what to do about this from a logistical perspective other than telling people "be wary of streamers".
your post certainly is true, but that doesn't refute totally the idea of opportunism...because he wants the big money of being a dancing monkey for a streaming platform having a relatively controversial act to stand out from the masses of booba streamers, vtubers and magat worms, but feeling like some kind of erudite on marxism at the same time
Well this is why I wondered about the use of the word, if it is being used in some way I don't follow on the meaning of. Because unless you have things you can point to that he's done or said that would suggest he's insincere, I'm not sure opportunist is the right word for it. People can be true believers and still do harm, so it's not like he can't also qualify for criticism even if he's not an opportunist.
I can say that the way I tend to interpret the word: an opportunist is someone who seizes on a moment for personal gain, even if (or especially if) it's at the cost of harm done to others; the aim is to play whatever part needs to be played in order to "get theirs" without really believing in it or taking it seriously.
I don't think this is the same inherently as acting on your material interests, even though the two can overlap.
At any rate, I'm more interested in whether he's overall doing harm or good to the cause than whether he's fully sincere about it.
maybe you're right...the word is not totally appropiate to define his actions, but we can't ignore the material conditions: he's a streamer who gets big money from a streaming platform in capitalism, owned by people that surely don't appreciate marxism or too militant leftism
Oh I agree completely on that. It's important to take that kind of stuff into account and be wary of those who are, by their position in life, incentivized to act in various ways against the interests of the international working class, the marginalized, etc.
To use myself as an example: Even though I'm no petty bourgeoisie streamer, I would expect an ML analysis to have some wariness pointed at me because I live in the imperial core and so my conditions are going to incentivize me to be more protective of the status quo than someone who lives in an imperialized country. That doesn't mean I'm de facto a less trustworthy person, or that I must necessarily have a worse understanding of the world than people in an imperialized country, but it does mean that broadly speaking, it makes sense for international efforts and analysis to take that dynamic into account when considering how to organize, where to put the most attention, and so on.