Sam Harris : Hasan Piker Is the Left's Nick Fuentes

[Leo Gura]

21 minutes ago, Cred said:

The fact they came from feudalism and managed to lift as many people out of poverty as they did and them ending up being able to compete with western states is nothing short of a miracle.

They would have had better results with plain old capitalism.

All of Marxism was a distraction.

Capitalism worked in America and it would have worked in China, Korea, Russia, Cuba, etc.

South Korea vs North Korea proves that.

As Marx himself said, you can't reach socialism without first going through capitalism. Marxists don't listen to Marx.

Edited 9 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Cred]

Yes you are correct in saying that it was a mistake "skippig" the capitalism stage of development like they tried in the udssr. A ton of contemporary Marxist-Leninists agree with you. There is no one approach to ML. It is very flexible. The approach of Mao was very different from that of the udssr for example.

I'm personally also a revisionist in that I'm saying capitalism has to do its thing in some areas for a while but in a controlled way. I encourage you do research the approach of Deng Xiaoping.

If you look at China, they are very capitalist and they have a shit ton of inequality. They are also enormously wealthy. Also they crush the capitalism game. Like they have whole cities organized around production to make it super efficient.

Very crucially though, the party is very involved in the market and in these companies and makes sure they actually serve the people and not the capitalists. Notably they are more involved in ,or own most of essential industries like housing, healthcare, food, etc. Chinese people have insanely high home ownership and have affordable healthcare.

In China, there are billionaires but they are kept in check. They executed like 14 of them in the last I don't know the time frame for corruption. The billionaires are scared shitless of the ccp. And this is a good thing. Compare that to the US where the billionaires get their dick sucked by the politicians. You really think the US is better off than China?  

Edited 9 hours ago by Cred

[Leo Gura]

10 minutes ago, Cred said:

In China, there are billionaires but they are kept in check. They executed like 14 of them in the last I don't know the time frame. They are scared shitless of the ccp. And this is a good thing. Compare that to the US where the billionaires get their dick sucked by the politicians. You really think the US is better off than China?

China does some things rights. However, I am not envious of the Chinese system. I would rather live in America, even if I wasn't already successful.

Authoritarian crackdown on billionaires is not exactly a good thing. It might feel good to you, but it isn't a healthy or fair system. It's a corrupt system. These billionaires are shaken down and bullied by the communist regime.

America would be a better system if we just outlawed any corporate money in politics.

It is not so complicated to create a few laws that eliminate billionaire influence of elections. I like this solution better than switching to Marxism, which is very impractical.

Edited 9 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Cred]

I also think that execution is a pretty extreme measure, however the fuck do I know about the best way to govern China.

China is in many regards not as authoritarian as you think. For example a lot of the notions of a social credit system or some shit are inventions by people in the west.

Capitalists in the west constantly make shit up to fuck with China like there is zero evidence about a uyghur genocide, every muslim majority country agrees with that.

They are very cautious about western influence. But if you knew how the US destabilizes and initiates coups in the countries of their enemies, you would understand. When any country opens themselves up for western information, they are also opening themselves up for western misinformation.

Edited 9 hours ago by Cred

[Joel3102]

https://archive.md/oZom2
 

Hasan is a campist, not a progressive. 
 

“The best word for Piker’s ideology may be “campism” — a strain of leftism that judges foreign movements and regimes more by their degree of hostility toward the West than by their adherence to progressive values.”

[Leo Gura]

58 minutes ago, Joel3102 said:

https://archive.md/oZom2
 

Hasan is a campist, not a progressive. 
 

“The best word for Piker’s ideology may be “campism” — a strain of leftism that judges foreign movements and regimes more by their degree of hostility toward the West than by their adherence to progressive values.”

I don't see why we need a new word for this. This is a feature of leftists.

I just call that Green/leftist.

I think Hasan is intelligent enough to understand that Hamas is not some pro-gay leftie organization. He knows they are barbaric terrorists. He just thinks they are justified in fighting back against the injustices done to them.

The notion that Hasan is some terrorism promoter is silly to me. He is just realistic about why terrorist exists and may even be necessary when your oppressor is a gigantic machine.

Hamas does not need to adhere to progressive values for us to recognize that they are just defending their homeland and families from getting raped by Zionists. It is silly to expect Hamas to have progressive values or else we refuse to see the validity of their grievances.

Hamas are barbarians and they are also victims of heinous crimes that made them barbarians. No great paradox here.

It is also silly to side with Israel just because Israel has some gay rights. As if gay rights somehow makes ethnic cleansing okay. This is actually an absurdity of the Sam Harris position: Israel is more progressive so they are allowed to ethnically cleanse anyone less progressive than them.

Keep in mind, slaves were less progressive and less developed than their slave masters. But that doesn't mean that slaves were wrong for overthrowing their masters. The entire issue is that Israel is progressive off the land they took from primitive Palestinians. The progress came at Palestinian expense and now the bill has come due.

America is also progressive thanks to our exploitation of 3rd world nations. It is legitimate for 3rd worlders to be pissed off about that.

Edited 4 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Joel3102]

32 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I don't see why we need a new word for this. This is a feature of leftists.

I just call that Green/leftist.

It’s not green/leftist, it’s red/blue old world leftist. The guy genuinely makes excuses for Mao and Russian imperialism etc. There’s a subtle difference between progressive criticism of western foreign policy (Majority Report types) based on human rights, and Hasan tankie types where it’s not actually a universal principle, it’s more that they’re just rooting for the other team.  

[Leo Gura]

23 minutes ago, Joel3102 said:

It’s not green/leftist, it’s red/blue old world leftist. The guy genuinely makes excuses for Mao and Russian imperialism etc. There’s a subtle difference between progressive criticism of western foreign policy (Majority Report types) based on human rights, and Hasan tankie types where it’s not actually a universal principle, it’s more that they’re just rooting for the other team.  

That is a function of ideology and ideology is part of Stage Green.

You guys are expecting too much from Green. Green is not free of ideology.

Just as Orange simps for capitalism, Green simps for socialism.

Yes, Hasan is rooting against capitalism. That is his view. Nothing crazy about it. Of course he is more forgiving of his ideological allies. That's the Marxist view of the world. Capitalists are the enemy.

Edited 3 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Cred]

8 minutes ago, Joel3102 said:

It’s not green/leftist, it’s red/blue old world leftist. The guy genuinely makes excuses for Mao and Russian imperialism etc. There’s a subtle difference between progressive criticism of western foreign policy (Majority Report types) based on human rights, and Hasan tankie types where it’s not actually a universal principle, it’s more that they’re just rooting for the other team.  

I also used to think that way but the problem is you don't know just how awful America is and always has been. The more I learn about imperialism the more I'm shocked at how comedically evil the US operates, also under Biden, Obama, etc. and how much misminformation and propaganda there is from the west.

Like the entire military of the US just exists to destabilize and terrorize people and to make some guys who control the politicians rich.

Mao was a great hero who did a ton of shit right. The fact that China is led by Marxist-Leninists now and as powerful as it is is nothing short of a miracle. If China was not communist right now, there would be no balance in the world order. The fact that there is a huge military in the world led by people who know and prioritize the awareness of the danger of capitalism is a gift from heaven.

I'm assuming you mean the Ukraine thing with Russian imperialism. When you are propagandized by western media, you will believe that Putin is this super evil lunatic. In reality, everything he does is in direct response to the hostility of the west. The west has mastered the art of covert imperialism. It is now more obvious under Trump but America has always been this warmongering nation it is now, it just used to be better at hiding it.

What the west did in Ukraine is they went in, bought a bunch of media outlets and specifically did western propaganda to make ukraine  pivot towards the west so that western corporations could exploit ukraines minerals and stuff. Also they want to overthrow the russian government to also extract their ressources. The expansion of nato is not to protect the nato states from great evil. The point is to destabilize Russia and exploit them. 

[Cred]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

That is a function of ideology and ideology is part of Stage Green.

You guys are expecting too much from Green. Green is not free of ideology.

Just as Orange simps for capitalism, Green simps for socialism.

Don't you notice that you are the one who has simplistic thinking, when you cram everyone into those categories?

[Leo Gura]

4 minutes ago, Cred said:

Don't you notice that you are the one who has simplistic thinking, when you cram everyone into those categories?

When the shoe fits.

The shoe fits well for folks below Tier 2.

This case validates Spiral Dynamics more than it doesn't. I can easily use Spiral Dynamics to understand Hasan and his critics. They are not doing anything original.

I would love these guys to not fit in such simplistic categories. But unfortunately they insist on it.

Edited 3 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Cred]

Again, Hassan is just a populist figurehead of Marxist-Leninists. You don't know how radical or advanced he really is and neither do I. What I do know is that real Marxist-Leninists are advanced philosophers. Like have you seen how much theory Lenin wrote in his life? Bro barely put that pen down. They care just as much about epistemic rigorosity as you and somehow the communists always somehow manage to put these theory nerds into positions of power??

Edited 3 hours ago by Cred

[Cred]

Populist rethoric and epistemically rigorous rethoric clash with each other. It is not possible to be perfectly epistemically rigorous and mobilize the masses at the same time. If you only see the populist branch of the communists you will have a false view of the movement. They value philosophy and advanced theory extremely highly, but they also know you can't mobilize the majority talking about dialectics and systems thinking theory.

When they address the internet, they assume the people who they are talking to mainly care about free healthcare and free housing and shit and they are correct with that assertion. The downside is of course that there is also a tiny minority of people listening, us, that want to hear rock hard logic, meta thinking and philosophy. It's not that they don't have that it's just that they don't talk about it on big platforms because it just turns people away. As someone who does advanced content on the internet you have the same problem I'm sure.

Edited 3 hours ago by Cred

[Joel3102]

10 minutes ago, Cred said:

What I do know is that real Marxist-Leninists are advanced philosophers. 

M-Ls live in their own over intellectualised delusional bubble. Where has it been shown to work anywhere to a comparable degree that liberalism has worked?

[Raze]

Hasan is a Champagne socialist. He just adopts it as an aesthetic. He does this with many things.

He used to mock people who said the left should reach out to young men, but post 2024 he was bringing it up like it was a genius insight he came up with, because it was in vogue.

Edited 2 hours ago by Raze

[Cred]

@Joel3102As far as I know Cuba has a higher literacy rate and less homelessness than the US for example. In China people don't have to pay for ambulances and homership is like 90% or some shit? Dude like I'm bad at this naming statistics game I'm not a debater bro. They pulled like 800 million people out of poverty. Shit like that doesn't happen in the west. Liberal states are always just the bare minimum of socialist so the people don't realize they are being oppressed.

Also what you need to understand is

1. You can't compare communist countries to liberal ones 1 to 1 since a lot of liberal countries were always wealthy while communist countries often had revolutions when the material conditions were dire.
2. Also a lot of the wealth of western countries comes from exploitation of the non-western countries. You can't really call this success imo.
3. It is not true that there is a fair marketplace of ideologies. The capitalists spend billions of dollars to make sure the communists have it as hard as possible.

Edited 2 hours ago by Cred

[Leo Gura]

31 minutes ago, Cred said:

Like have you seen how much theory Lenin wrote in his life? Bro barely put that pen down

I cannot take Lenin seriously. He was a power-hungry ideologue. He was not a serious intellectual.

He turned Marxism into a religion and it ended exactly as Bakunin predicted 50 years earlier: Stalin's gulags.

Edited 2 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Joel3102]

7 minutes ago, Cred said:

@Joel3102As far as I know Cuba has a higher literacy rate and less homelessness than the US for example.

No one in the US is itching to move to Cuba lol. Plenty of Cubans want to move the US though 

[Cred]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I cannot take Lenin seriously. He was a power-hungry ideologue. He was not a serious intellectual.

https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1s1x3gi/norman_finkelstein_on_lenin/

[Cred]

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

He turned Marxism into a religion

Marxists use religious imagery, ideology, dogma, nationalism as a pragmatic tool. They don't do it out of personal potive (ideally).

I'm not saying there are no currupt marxists but they sure as hell are less corrupt than capitalists.