Videos

How are you coming to the conclusion that they are “someone qualified”?

Someone who is trans is automatically qualified, to a certain extent, to speak about trans issues. It doesn't mean they're always right or anything, but it means they start from a baseline of being worth listening to. If you are cis and just derisively shutting them down as far as trans issues, and giving these wild insults (I can't even remember the context from the video but I remember it was bad) that have very little to do with anything they were saying, and just serve to try to tear them down and punish them so they won't try to speak up again, then yes, you're a piece of shit. To me there's not a lot of context that could somehow "save" that.

Maybe there’s more to that interaction that you clipped out of the video - i have no idea

You haven't watched it, have you...

For one of these, I actually did dig up the context. Stuff like that is important to me. So for the "I think you're choking her" clip, I dug up the context and posted it. A couple of the Hasan stans actually swore to me that the likely outcome after that clip was that he would loosen the collar and all would be well. Because of course you would. Any reasonable person would, and is Hasan not a reasonable person?

Turns out the answer was no, he did not loosen it. He blamed the issue on her NECK. MEAT. and there was an awkward silence, and then the guest who has raised the issue wisely redirected away from the looming confrontation, and just dropped the issue and went back to what she'd been talking about, as if they hadn't discovered an active issue of suffering in Hasan's favorite animal.

You know, a normal interaction and normal behavior for a pet owner.

Interesting you list Chomsky as an example because he’s made exactly the same arguments about the Ukraine war as Piker was in that video.

What? These are totally different arguments. Chomsky says, more or less:

• The US in Iraq was far worse and more brutal than Russia in Ukraine (true)
• Particular countries want into NATO for economic reasons, not reasons of safety (I'm not qualified to judge, I have no idea, but it sounds plausible)
• The West doesn't actually care about Ukraine, they actually want to draw out the conflict to bleed Russia for their own reasons which increases the suffering (100% agree, I actually frequently raise this point when it comes up, I think I've said it a couple of times on Lemmy) (and also I have additional elements to add to that which come from people who know a lot about the inner workings of US diplomacy, ask me what Dan Ellsberg has to say about it.)

That all makes sense. I might agree with it or disagree but it's fine. What Hasan says is:

• The "rest of the countries of the world" or something like that, see Russia's war in Ukraine as a strike against Western and US imperialism

That, in contrast, is a big bunch of horseshit.

Like I said, this is what I don't like about Hasan. He's just an idiot. He just says weird stuff, whatever comes to mind ("vibration collars are good for calling your dog back when she can't hear you...") but it lines up generally speaking with the geopolitical battle lines that some people like to draw, and so they support him even though a lot of times what he's saying is just nonsense. He blames world events on CIA/Mossad the instant he hears of them, he waves around his shock collar with tape over it swearing it's something else, he just kind of says stuff that's on the right performative side, and to some people that's enough.

I have no idea why you guys are taken in by this guy. You're welcome to it, I guess, but he's a pretty fucking bad standard bearer if you're looking for leftist podcast people. What happened to chapotraphouse? Behind the Bastards? I haven't seen them, I don't know... like I say I just am not involved in this space, so I have no idea who to vouch for in it, but there has to be better out there than this fucking guy.

Also, I asked you a couple times: What should I watch from Hasan to get a good idea about him? I'm going to stop asking soon, but I am genuinely curious what his supporters would want me to watch as a good introduction. If someone asked me that about James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, whatever, I would have something that I would want to share. You are not obligated to of course I guess.