Tldr (go watch Angela Collier's video on him for the full story), Richard Feynmann was a really good physicist and educator, but his most popular stuff is usually him being a misogynistic asshole [going a strip club and playing bongos, speaking gibberish and saying he was simply speaking a "regional dialect" to foreigners, forcing waitresses to earn their tip by making them answer physics questions in the middle of their shift, etc.].
That really how I feel with Bad Empanada. Because his main channel is good, well sourced and does a good job at educating people on anti imperialist causes.
But I never hear about that really. All I hear from people who like him are all of his really bad takes and his constant brain rot on Twitter and bluesky.
I would much rather hear about his really well researched videos on the Iraq War and Israel's genocide. I don't want to hear about some tirade he made on twitter/Bsky about something or other.
Like, 90% of his videos on his main channel are good, and the ones I criticize are at the very least still professional. But I don't see content from those, I only constantly see content from his live channel and his Twitter. And I'm like...why? Why emphasize this part so much? Sure you can't separate the two, but there's the really, really good part of the person, and then the part where he's an abrasive asshole. Why are you emphasizing on the second part?
Sorry, this isn't some in depth debunking of him on anything. Like I said, I do like what he does and I think he is mostly correct. But for some reason people [who support him and all his views] love emphasizing the bits where he's wrong for some reason. So I just wanted to vent that out.
Edit: There's also the flipside of this, which is Hasan. I think Hasan is very friendly, pretty mature, and someone who is all round respectable. At the same time, I think his actual work is pretty meh at best, detrimental at worst. To go back to my Feynmann analogy, I might think that Neil Degrasse Tyson seems like a pretty okay guy who I would like to have a conversation with, and not as much of an ass as Feynmann. But Feynmann was definitely a much, much better physicist and educator than Tyson
Edit 2: nvm this bit about Hasan was kinda stupid. I haven't changed my opinion really, but the analogy is dumb and forced
I think Tyson is not a fair comparison with Hasan because Tyson is a sex pest along with being an endlessly irritating reddit-style dipshit. I'm sure there's some astrophysics stuff that he's good at, but there's just so much downside with him all around.
If you want to hear people endlessly complain about Hasan, I'm sure you can find a good coterie over on Hexbear to satisfy that, but while I sometimes disagree with Hasan -- very vociferously on some issues, in fact -- I think it's very difficult to argue that his overall output is negative when he spends so much of it on doing things like advocating against Israel and its lapdogs (which he had been doing for his whole career and not just when it became fashionable recently), along with explaining to hogs about how they are hurting themselves with false consciousness without getting too "le drumpf" about it. He does sometimes punch left, but generally he has a very deliberate policy of avoiding attacking, for example, actually revolutionary socialists despite himself advocating for a demsoc platform, which I think is a self-conscious attempt to mitigate the harm done by the way he moderates his position.
I agree that people are too fixated on talking about BE's rancid twitter bullshit when his main channel broadly has very good videos and even his secondary channel is -- while kind of dominated by drama slop -- also a decent resource on things like counters to various zionist talking points, particularly their revisionist history. Not to sound like the other top comment, which I don't really respect, but I think it is just a fact that the reason the emphasis gets slanted is because the people he disparages for his dumb chauvinist reasons on twitter have a huge demographic overlap with the online left (myself included in some cases), so people are going to take personal offense at him going out of his way for whatever brainrotted reason he thinks he has to attack them or, at the very least, people close to them. It's a very normal reaction and part of the reason that his chauvinist axe-grinding is rhetorically a terrible strategy if he's anything other than a shitty tailist trying to get approval from ACP types (which I don't think he is, I think he's just such an asshole that it undermines him having a coherent strategy).
Edit: I see your comparison was actually more direct than I thought. Over on HB people mostly complain about BE for the reason explained above. I haven't seen many people support his really antisocial bullshit but I can see here that it's something people do. I don't really have an answer for you on what you actually meant except that a lot of people on the left is genuinely deeply misanthropic and they find various ways to dress up their misanthropy as righteous. You can see how people who generally were either rejected by society or oppressed by a dominant segment of it would become excessively resentful, so again I don't think it's really all that interesting a phenomenon. It's just a version of "when education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." They are hurt and currently can't see the inadequacy in a pseudo-politics of just venting their spleen at the ingroup that made them an outgroup, even if most of the people they hate and profess to want to see the suffering of never did shit to them and are unlikely to ever do so in the future.
Tyson is a what? Goddammit. Why? I don't really like the guy but cmon this is getting old at this point
1.Source? I legitimately hadn't heard of this till now
It was from some time ago and a major factor in a show of his getting canceled and his waned star in the current day. Here you can see what he had to say about it at the time:
https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A10158921227506613%7D&path=%2Fnotes%2Fnote%2F
I'm not really sure if that's a tracking link or where the tracking part is (though I'd guess starting from the &), I just got it from Reddit. He's not on the magnitude of like a Weinstein or Cosby or whatever, though one of the allegations (which we don't really have evidence for or against) is pretty grave, otherwise he's generally just creepy.
Even without this part I still don't think Hasan/NDT is a good analogy because, again, Tyson is famously an insufferably obtuse asshole in the vein of reddit scientism and basically doing CinemaSins for anything he can possibly think to.