Haha, sorry you feel that way! I’m just doing everything I can to fight for the working class, and working class solidarity is important to me. Much love, solidarity forever!
🏳️🌈 hi there, i’m blake! i’m a silly gay bear 🌀
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: February 25th, 2025
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I don’t remember, I just remember your username
I don’t hitch my opinions to streamers in any way.
Neither do I - actually, kind of the opposite! Hasan represents a voice which spreads many of my my long-held beliefs to millions of people. I only started watching him pretty recently, after hearing a bunch of criticism and deciding to check him out myself and being pleasantly surprised, but I’ve been far-left since I was a teenager. I disagree with him on many issues, and I’ve even argued with him on his stream. I’ve seen him actually get closer to my beliefs over time, which is very nice to see.
I don’t remember you but I bet you were saying dumb shit
I was saying what I always say - that capitalism inevitably leads to fascism and that liberalism is a shield to capitalism.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
But can't capitalism can be reformed?
While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.
Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.
The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
But the Soviet Union was really oppressive!
Yeah, the soviet union had a lot of problems, Stalin was a psycho. Let’s not do that, but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.
I’d encourage you to check out an anarchist FAQ to learn more - If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think.
I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism makes inevitable.
Thanks for responding and for your honesty. I’m really curious about a few things, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you some questions and maybe we can chat a little? I’m not interested in judging you or shaming you or anything like that, but I would love to understand you.
- What got you into watching Asmongold?
- Did you have any strong political/ideological positions/beliefs before you started watching him?
- What are your political/ideological positions/beliefs now?
1·2 hours agoYou cannot imagine how little people cared about the things you care about in US (Ie. Israel/Gaza)
Well, to begin with, Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was just one issue I mentioned among half a dozen, but I think you’d actually be surprised:
Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza
If you’re making the point that Israel’s genocide wasn’t the biggest contributor to Kamala’s loss, I would agree. Polling has shown that voters care about medicare for all and the cost of living crisis far more, but the DNC completely refuse to address those issues in any meaningful way either. The fact is, they put the interests of the wealthy before the interests of the working class, because of wealthy and corporate donors, and PACs. With that said, Israel’s genocide absolutely was quite a significant issue, and acting like it wasn’t just because you feel like it wasn’t, is ignorant denialism.
If you genuinely thought Harris would support Israel more than Trump, I have few bridges to sell you.
Do you not recognize that I am presenting a nuanced position? I’m not saying that Harris was worse than Trump, I’m saying that she did not significantly differentiate herself from Trump because she held positions that were close to the Republican party and she refused to yield to the left/progressive flank of the Democratic party, and that is why the Democratic party lost.
You really should come to terms with the fact that the Trump presidency is now in power because the DNC refused to give working class voters what they want, because the DNC is more responsive to their wealthy donors than they are to the needs of the working class. Both mainstream parties are completely beholden to the interests of the ruling class.
Fair enough! Personally, I am all in favor of slow decision making if it means everyone is free and we can live in a world without rulers, but if you disagree, that’s fine. I’m sure you believe that some sort of compromise is possible where you can somehow have representative democracy without inevitable extreme corruption, but we can agree to disagree on that.
For the record, I’m not the person downvoting you :)
I haven’t downvoted you, either! I never downvote people who disagree with me in good faith…Might interest you to know that upvotes/downvotes are a matter of public record, too - you can use e.g. https://lemvotes.org/ to see who has upvoted and downvoted a comment/post.
Thanks for a pleasant and civil discussion, it’s always a breath of fresh air <3
I don’t know much about wrestling, but that sounds awesome and you should do it!!
The Democrats didn’t have a candidate who inspired people to get out and vote. They just keep trying to appeal to some moderate centrist vote which doesn’t actually ever materialize.
If Harris didn’t peddle the exact same anti-immigrant, pro-israel, genocide supporting neoliberal shit and instead advocated for medicare for all, wealth tax, opposition to war, and bringing Israel to heel, she would have absolutely swept the election.
That’s why the Republicans had a stronger turnout. Trump was offering his base all of the psychotic shit they love.
You can’t blame voters for not being engaged and getting out to vote when the very best they can hope for is the not-quite-as-bad-as-Trump candidate. That shit does not work. They need to actually give their voters things they want, not just be the lesser evil.
Yeah, I don’t care for streamer drama either. I like watching Hasan’s stream because he generally has pretty good analysis on things most of the time, and as a European it helps me stay informed about US politics from a leftist perspective, but he’s not for everyone, for sure.
Obviously some code gremlins inside the Fediverse somewhere decided that you needed to be informed about two random people arguing about politics and low stakes streamer drama on the internet. The people must know!
Oh wow, that’s really strange! No, I wrote it as a top-level comment on this post. Here’s a link to the comment on my instance
huh? I wasn’t directing that comment at you at all, what made you think it was directed at you?
He has consistently stated that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong and is an imperialist endeavor. I haven’t heard him say a good word about Russia or Putin
I watch his streams pretty regularly and he’s extremely consistent. I’d say he’s honest and direct about his opinions to a fault, even. He has a LOT of haters who tend to be a bit… obsessive, to put it charitably.
Omg you’re that guy who came in to argue with me about liberalism in the other thread, it makes complete sense that you’re a “fuck Hasan” guy. Are you an Asmongold fan?
154·13 hours agogenAI has predominantly been pushed by the US, particularly the super wealthy in the US, so that they can exploit the working class even more and pay them even less. As much as I hate genAI, seeing Iran, who was absolutely the wronged party in this completely illegal and unnecessary war of imperialist aggression on behalf of a genocidal ethnostate, turn the tool of the oppressors against them, and using it to agitate for class consciousness in the USA, is just fucking awesome, IMO.
Did you see the anti-Trump rap one? It actually goes so fucking hard.
Both US mainstream parties were neoliberal, so… yeah? I’m not sure if you were being sarcastic or not. They enabled eachother. While the Republicans are much worse, the Democrats didn’t prevent the rise of fascism, because doing so would have required moving towards the left, which would have impacted the class interests of wealthy donors. If the Democratic party hadn’t gone around parading with Liz Cheney and denying the genocide, they’d have won, they literally snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with Harris/Biden.
Will do! Thanks <3