Everyone knows Communism is when you have no money, but it's also important to have no fame. No media or social media presence. Every Twitter follower you gain makes you less communist. That's why I, the one true leftist, exclusively make bad posts here in the sub-basement of the internet.
Come to c/badposting, comrade
No everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world. The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence. Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper. I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate. Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership. There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin. I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money. I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol. I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own. My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist. During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles. George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together. The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor. Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution. I am very smart and people like being around me.
Communism isn't a poverty cult, Hasan hasn't done anything egregious and he spreads the good word as well as combating lib shit talking points. He presents the news from the left perspective and there's a major need for that.
The organized core of leftism in America got bombed out and violently suppressed. There's not really a labor movement that he's letting down by being a millionaire. I can imagine a late stage communism where someone is capable of working enough to warrant a million dollars in entitlement to luxury products. I don't imagine there is a leftist movement that can tell him what to do with his money that he made creating entertainment slop. Especially not when the voices get mixed in with people who rattle sabers about "socialism vuvuzela no iphone"
He sort of is in that all the neoliberal streamers that say “Hasan must go” end up caving their own careers in like Keffals and Vaush recently did. It’s only a matter of time before Destiny oversteps once again
You don't have to dig that hard. Destiny first got streamer famous when he made a (CW: sexual violence)
joke that went viral while streaming SC2.spoiler
Rape
He seems to go in and out. There’s a wave of popularity and then he says some dumb shit that causes his relevance to fall back before the cycle continues again. There’s a cap to how popular he can get because of how toxic of a person he is.
I don’t think he’ll ever reach Hasan levels with how much of a brand risk he is while also being a shit person that very few outside of the political realm want to collaborate with
the fuck are you talking about
Credit where credit is due, his content educating people on Palestine helped keep me sane in the early months of the genocide, whereas I was otherwise completely surrounded by Hasbara propaganda.
His views on the Russia/Ukraine war are off point, but for the most part I think he's a really great entry point into leftism for the zoomers.
I still don't understand why people watch other people stream themselves playing video games though, dafuq?
It can be nice to watch some quick, uncut moment-to-moment gameplay of something. (to get a feel for a game) Plus, if you play games somewhat seriously, you can learn stuff by watching pros. Now, with that said, I agree that just watching hours upon hours of gameplay is not what I do, but I'm sure some people enjoy it
Would you rather have a communist anti us empire streamer on twitch with millions of viewers or would you rather have no politically left streamers that are very popular. Those are the options and I think the former is better than the later.
People: give money to Hasan
Hasan: spends the money
People: 
Ultimately, Hasan's money comes from you, the viewer. If you want your money to go to charities instead of to Ferrari, donate to charities instead of to Hasan.
Idc what he spends his money on tbh as long as it's not actively harming people (aside from the inevitable 'passive harm' so to speak from "no ethical consumption under capitalism"); I care if he pulls people to the left in a space that lacks actual leftist voices. And that he seems to do quite well.
Does the 'passive harm' from his consumption practices outweigh the benefit of how much he pulls people to the left? Idk and I don't think anyone should care enough to do empirical research on that and find out.
Ultimately, Hasan's money comes from you, the viewer. If you want your money to go to charities instead of to Ferrari, donate to charities instead of to Hasan.
On the other hand, fine
On the critical side of things, this doesn't sound too far from bourgeois justification of their own wealth...
Whenever you donate to Hasan, you show that you prefer Hasan saying your name out loud over saving the lives of children, and I think that says a whole lot more about you than about Hasan.
As an aside, Hasan's money comes from voluntary and optional viewer donations, not from the exploitation of labor. Nobody is being forced to give their money to Hasan. Withholding your money from Hasan does not mean that you will starve. Hasan's stream is free to watch and always has been free.
Nobody donates to Hasan with the expectation that the money will go to charities unless it is a charity stream. The normal expectation is that Hasan will spend the money on his own lifestyle, which includes buying a nice house and luxury cars, because he has a high income from having a large audience.
Stop complaining about Hasan not living in a barrel and giving away all his money to charities. Saying that suffering is necessary to live a morally good life reeks of Christian morality.
Hasan is clearly not in it for the money. In recent months, he has sacrificed half his viewerbase by continuing to report on Israel's genocide in Gaza when this is an unpopular thing to do. He has taken a direct hit to his income (and thus his lifestyle) in order to do what is right. Have you done the same? If not, on what legs do you stand on to criticize him?
I don't give him money, I don't even watch him. The point stands: can't he spend the money in better ways?
Whatever. I don't really think about him that much and I prefer to keep it that way.
I get he’s “our guy”, but monetizing parasociality is a slightly more ethical form of grifting at best.
sir, this is the CHAPO TRAP HOUSE forum
yes, we all listen to citations needed, what of it?
I wish that podcast spent more time reviewing the latest mel gibson movie and less time critiquing liberal media
Yeah, like the subreddit? What else could that refer to?
You mean the drug dealer?
I've watched Hasan for around 4 years. He used to not run ads at all. Then Amazon forced him to start running ads. He told people to use ad blockers. Amazon told him that he wasn't allowed to say ad blocker. Then Amazon forces him to run 3 minutes of ads per hour instead of 1 minute per hour. Hasan is contracted by Amazon and Amazon controls certain aspects of the stream. Amazon also takes a huge portion of the money that Hasan receives.
However, Hasan can't change platforms because he would lose his whole audience. If you had a channel on twitch and you decided that you wanted to stream in a different way, you would also lose the majority of your audience. You can't self host a stream; we don't live in the 2000s anymore; most people don't want to make an account on a self hosted website; the internet is centralized now. If you moved your channel to youtube or other corporate owned site, you would just have a different corporation trying to squeeze profits out of you and still lose half your audience in the switch. So Hasan has to stay with twitch and twitch forces him to do certain things because as like every other employers, they want to extract surplus value.
Also, he allows his fans to monetize clips from his twitch stream on youtube. He has an official youtube channel which is run by his editors and he has said that all of the money from the youtube channel goes to those editors. Then there's like 50+ other channels which are fan run youtube channels, which get payed just for uploading editted clips from his stream. Youtube has tried to take down his fan channels several times and Hasan has gone out of his way to keep his fan's channels up so that his fans could make money from reuploading clips of his stream.
Complaining that Hasan gets payed money for being a journalist and news commentator is a real "you complain about capitalism and yet you exist" moment. He provides good news coverage. I've never given him money. I don't have a twitch account. I block ads. Watching the stream is free.
I've posted on Hexbear that I think Hasan has good news coverage since I joined hexbear 3 years ago. People told me that he wasn't a real Marxist, that he had bad opinions, or that they prefer to watch some fringe weirdos on tik tok who said Hasan is bad. They never actually watched his streams because even as far back as 2018-2019 Hasan was openly speaking in favor of Marxism. He went on chapo is 2019. From 2020-2021, he would still talk about Marxism but with more vague terminology because he was trying (and succeeding) at converting liberals into being Marxist. Lately he's again openly telling people that he's a Marxist and his audience has been shrinking because of it. Telling people that you're a Marxist doesn't make money, if his intention was to maximize his money, why is he telling people he's a Marxist now?
Before the Oct 7 Al-Aqsa Flood, Hasan was averaging 30k-40k live viewers. His average live viewership is now around 20k. Since doing coverage on the war in Gaza in support of Palestinians, calling for a ceasefire, for the past 4 months, Hasan has lost nearly half of his live viewers. He went from being a top 10 streamer on twitch to rank #30. If Hasan's purpose was "monetizing parasociality", why would he spend the last 4 months doing coverage in support of Palestinians which lost almost half of his live audience? Hasan's news coverage is a reflection of the correct Marxist perspective, even when it loses viewers. Calling for a ceasefire in Gaza loses viewers but Hasan does it anyway because it is the right thing to do.
Agreed, Hasan is basically the best we can get outside of YouTube weirdos who do hour long video essays with 20k views at most. He's not going to be perfect but he's going to be better than 99% of other content creators. Honestly I don't know what people want or expect to get out of the modern internet.
Raises hand.
I have one question, good user!
It's just, err...
I just want to ask...
...
...WHO MUST GO?!?!?!?!
Hasan's pretty good when talking about anti-American Empire in the abstract, but he whiffs a lot in practice.
The funniest running gag is all the people who come on his stream commenting how small his "mansion" actaully is, apparently it's just a normal sized villa in West Hollywood and not a Fresh Prince sized mansion
You paid 3 million for this!?
Hasan good
Leftism is the conceptual and normative architecture that houses and justifies my pettiest resentments for not having an Italian supercar, actually.
(The problem isn't that Hasan is inauthentic or insufficiently engaged in action, but is, in part, that the current state of the affairs facilitates and encourages an engagement w the world reduced to interactions alone, in front of a screen.)
I actively avoid streamer stuff because it enrages me by being so crappy, but I do notice I still get recommendations on youtube for videos where it's like "THE END OF HASAN (HASANABI)" or "THE DESERVED DOWNFALL OF HASANABI". And I'm like yeah that's wishful thinking. Once these e-celebs get big enough, the only thing that can really stop their careers is losing relevance slowly over time. They don't seem to just implode and go away unless they get caught up in major legal issues or something profoundly humiliating / shameful.
losing relevance slowly over time
to be fair that is (sorta) what's happening with hasan. But like, ebbs and flows are normal. its not always an election year and most americans don't want to hear how complicit in genocide they are day in and day out
DO YOU KNOW WHO HIS UNCLE IS?!
What does his uncle think of the Armenian genocide?
yeah i dont like hasan. sure he's hot and he donates money a lot but really man? fucking mansions and ferraris? why not use some of the money you spent living a life of total luxury on anything productive?
He doesn't have a mansion, he has a relatively regular sized house. LA house prices are just dumb.
why not use some of the money you spent living a life of total luxury on anything productive?
Streaming 8 hours a day to convert people to leftism isn't productive? Covering news from a left perspective isn't productive?
Hasan wishes he was 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% as cool as the Lion of Damascus.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Gossip posts go in c/gossip. Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from c/gossip