This guy’s dad is the former VP of a multibillion dollar Turkish conglomerate, as well as the secretary of a government department. Mom and Dad were able to fly to their other home in NJ to give birth so he’d get US citizenship. His uncle is the founder and owner of TYT Media and gave him his media career. He went to Rutgers. He lives in a multimillion dollar mansion in the Hollywood Hills. This is by definition not the kind of person who can be a voice of the People. Saying “I recognize my privilege” over and over, while living his lifestyle, doesn’t negate his privilege and complete lack of real-life experience outside of the curated garden of the wealthy. He gets paid obscene amounts of cash to sit in his bedroom and word-vomit for 9 hours a day. Why are his unending opinions taken so seriously? He gives me strong controlled opposition vibes.

Edit: Thank you all for this discussion. I learned a lot.

  • AnneVolin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Because this is a plain instance of him not being a class traitor to further his own career and desires.

    The reality of the “stop pocket watching” argument that Hasan has successfully deployed on his fans and friends is that it’s the same argument every rich person pulls out when you question how they spend their money and what that practically says about their place and ideas for society at large.

    The argument isn’t that “people shouldn’t live in LA” (okay fine maybe it is a little). The argument is that Hasan made the same choice that every influencer makes.

    Beyond the very obvious influencer argument? How exactly do you think that upper middle class comes to support capitalism as a whole? They get addicted to their level of consumption like every wealthy class has done for millennia.

    So the argument there isn’t “Hasan doesn’t deserve nice things”, it’s that “Hasan’s appetite for nice things is a form of class expression” and there is a point of where that class expression and the addiction to consumption overrides in what you do overrides any “do socialism” argument that you say on stream.

    This is literally how the nomenklatura got fat in the USSR, they didn’t have streams but they had their local, national, and general assembly soviets. Every post-Soviet person knows an uncle who was a party apparatchik and stopped saying “do socialism” the moment the wall came down, and he was one out of maybe two/three guys in your whole extended family who happened to have a car prior to 1995.

    Y’all are getting wrecked by the same attitudes that wrecked the USSR and y’all don’t even have state capitalism with socialist characteristics.