Dude just loves riling himself up into a frenzy, doesn’t he? I guess he was mad that Hasan was going to interview Obama, which never even happened, and now he thinks Hasan is a “genocide supporter” because a random YouTube clip he came across that said “Hasan supports Kamala’s policies”, which he never even watched and was most likely just clipped. Hasan isn’t perfect, but fuck, you think at least him going to the DNC as a journalist would be considered fair from BE. Wild.
Scolding the kids will only get you so far. They have to have time to grow up. That being said, I do not take the political convictions of teenagers very seriously, much like I don’t take the political convictions of academics very seriously, because neither are fully engaged with the life experience of the industrial proletariat.
Wouldn’t you consider someone like Parenti an academic?
Parenti absolutely was an academic. And he’s a good one. A great one even. That said, it wouldn’t have shaken my personal political convictions of he had suddenly denounced the entirety of his work and endorsed the democrats, or suddenly decided the USSR was bad actually, and that anarchist Catalonia was the one true leftist movement. He’s just an observer, not a participant, in revolution.
This is opposed to someone like Trotsky, who I take far more seriously, who for me has taken many years of exposure and reading to understand what elements of his criticism of the USSR are valid, and what parts are cuckoo-bananas ideological hallucinations given the period of time he lived in. And for Trotsky, his criticisms got more outlandish the less involved and responsible he was with the actual process of government. Another example, someone like Gorbachev should be taken seriously, but given his cowardice to publicly oppose Stalin’s popularity with the people of the USSR after his death, it is difficult to treat him as acting in good faith.
I take revolutionaries and their histories and ideas very seriously. Half the reason I take Marx seriously is because Mao, Lenin, and Ho Chi Mihn take him seriously, and understanding revolutionary theory in the 20th century is impossible without understanding him.
this is why having a Twitch Streamer celebrity as a “pipeline” to being “leftist” is completely irrelevant and not a point in streamer’s favor. Oh so the kids online are consuming a different flavor of brainrot content? So what? It’s all a fake online game if this is your avenue of approach and I suspect people in this thread take umbrage with that analysis because they also approached from this angle and to some extent, it’s a fake online game to them too
I am hoping it’s more of a theory exposure therapy for the horrors yet to come. We’ll have to see.