Tldr (go watch Angela Collier’s video on him for the full story), Richard Feynmann was a really good physicist and educator, but his most popular stuff is usually him being a misogynistic asshole [going a strip club and playing bongos, speaking gibberish and saying he was simply speaking a “regional dialect” to foreigners, forcing waitresses to earn their tip by making them answer physics questions in the middle of their shift, etc.].
That really how I feel with Bad Empanada. Because his main channel is good, well sourced and does a good job at educating people on anti imperialist causes.
But I never hear about that really. All I hear from people who like him are all of his really bad takes and his constant brain rot on Twitter and bluesky.
I would much rather hear about his really well researched videos on the Iraq War and Israel’s genocide. I don’t want to hear about some tirade he made on twitter/Bsky about something or other.
Like, 90% of his videos on his main channel are good, and the ones I criticize are at the very least still professional. But I don’t see content from those, I only constantly see content from his live channel and his Twitter. And I’m like…why? Why emphasize this part so much? Sure you can’t separate the two, but there’s the really, really good part of the person, and then the part where he’s an abrasive asshole. Why are you emphasizing on the second part?
Sorry, this isn’t some in depth debunking of him on anything. Like I said, I do like what he does and I think he is mostly correct. But for some reason people [who support him and all his views] love emphasizing the bits where he’s wrong for some reason. So I just wanted to vent that out.
Why? Because he doesn’t coddle the feelings of First Worlders who, with very little exception, support, participate in, and directly benefit from imperialism?
he’s a petite-bourgois white settler who has been overtly ableist and transphobic on multiple occasions
he’s a petite-bourgois
No he isn’t. He is a YouTuber who makes all of his content by himself. That’s not petite bourgeois, nor would him being petite bourgeois or white or a settler invalidate a single thing he has ever said
who has been overtly ableist and transphobic on multiple occasions
When?
He is a YouTuber who makes all of his content by himself. That’s not petite bourgeois
yes it is. the proletariat sell their labor power, he sells the product of his labor which is the petite-bourgeois relation.
yes it is. the proletariat sell their labor power, he sells the product of his labor which is the petite-bourgeois relation.
No it isn’t. You fundamentally misunderstand what the term “petite bourgeois” means. Peasants and artisans also sell the product of their labour rather than their labour power, yet they’re not considered petite bourgeois. You know why? Because petite bourgeoisie literally means “small capitalists”. The petite bourgeoisie are wealthy enough to extract surplus value from others (thus making them bourgeois); but not wealthy enough to subsist entirely off of that surplus (separating them from the haute bourgeoisie, or the big capitalists). BadEmpanada does not hire anyone, so he is not bourgeois. If he’s not bourgeois, then he cannot be petite bourgeois.
Both peasants and artisans are petit bourgeois.
No they aren’t for the reasons I explained above. They by and large don’t extract surplus value, so can’t be bourgeois. Peasants and artisans literally pre-date the bourgeoisie by thousands of years.
if there’s no extraction of surplus labour involved, he’s not petit bourgeois, he’s an artisan (although successful artisans often do become bourgeois)
I’m so tired of people yelling about his supposedly ‘transphobic’ behaviors. He attacked Viki1999 and Contrapoints for their support of Israel, and was proven right on both counts. They just happen to both be white trans women.
Viki1999 literally said that she supports Israel because supposedly, she believes she would be “thrown off a roof by Hamas in Gaza”. BadEmpanada pointed this out, causing others to apply enough backlash for her to quit YouTube. BadEmpanada never supported the dog piling, just pointed out her fucked up beliefs.
I love how this is the immediate reaction of anyone whenever I or someone else criticizes Badempanada. This is going to be insulting, I’m sorry, but this is the same tactic of those rightist conservatives who just complain that “you’re a snowflake who gets offended by everything. Why do you need to be coddled you sissy?” Based off of nothing else but just me complaining he’s an insufferable douche (at best) to everyone, not just first worlders and not just rightists.
And you also engage in the same behavior that I’m complaining about in the post. You revel in how his abrasive personality makes westerners sooooo uncomfortable, ignoring how that same personality has led to him making extreme errors in his otherwise good analysis, and hurting genuine comrades.
I’m not complaining about how he makes westerners feel bad, I’m complaining that people put up with him for metaphysical reasons relating to that. Like Feynmann, he does stuff we wouldn’t put up with normally, but since he does it tow be quirky and different compared to his colleagues in the space, it’s alright.
And I’m genuinely trying to be extremely charitable. I’m comparing him to a Nobel award winning physicist for crying out loud. And I’m not dissecting him and his behavior (although I very well could, if I had the time or was terminally online enough), I’m really just complaining that is how we have to interact with him and his influence. I would much rather have a mature discussion about anti-imperialism, but every week or so he says something else that sounds super cool and unlimited genocide on the first world or whatever, but that people who have actually read theory have to take time deconstructing or responding to(his recent thing on unions is just one in a long string of issues). So in the end I just get sick of him and his entire persona.
I love how this is the immediate reaction of anyone whenever I or someone else criticizes Badempanada. This is going to be insulting, I’m sorry, but this is the same tactic of those rightist conservatives who just complain that “you’re a snowflake who gets offended by everything. Why do you need to be coddled you sissy?” Based off of nothing else but just me complaining he’s an insufferable douche (at best) to everyone, not just first worlders and not just rightists.
Yes because your argument literally boils down to “he’s an arsehole” (which, 99% of the time, is warranted). When he’s an arsehole to supposed “left-wingers”, it’s usually because they aren’t actually acting like left-wingers (e.g. operating within the framework of Jewish exceptionalism or attacking anyone who does anything to meaningfully oppose imperialism) or they’re spreading defamatory lies about him (e.g. that he’s a bigot or a paedophile)
I’m not complaining about how he makes westerners feel bad, I’m complaining that people put up with him for metaphysical reasons relating to that. Like Feynmann, he does stuff we wouldn’t put up with normally, but since he does it tow be quirky and different compared to his colleagues in the space, it’s alright.
I tolerate him because, in the grand scheme of things, he is an overwhelmingly positive influence. He’s done more to actually educate people about colonialism and imperialism and to put Zionists in their place than the rest of the online left combined. I don’t care if you personally find him harsh or rude or dismissive of other people’s feelings. Sometimes we have to work with people who we don’t like. That’s just the way the world works. Not everyone is going to want to be a part of your little hugbox
I would much rather have a mature discussion about anti-imperialism, but every week or so he says something else that sounds super cool and unlimited genocide on the first world or whatever, but that people who have actually read theory have to take time deconstructing or responding to(his recent thing on unions is just one in a long string of issues). So in the end I just get sick of him and his entire persona.
What did he say about first world unions that was wrong?
defamatory lies about him (e.g. that he’s a bigot
he literally tweeted something about how trans people aren’t real like two weeks ago
First Worlders
he’s australian
he literally tweeted something about how trans people aren’t real like two weeks ago
That’s not what he said. He acknowledges that trans men are men, trans women are women, and nonbinary people are valid. He just doesn’t believe in “faunagender” identities like “puppygender” because you literally cannot be a dog, and he’s suggested (without pointing to anyone in particular) that a lot of First Worlders pretend to be part of the trans community or some other marginalised group because of the perceived social cred, using their status as a bludgeon against anyone who criticises them
he’s australian
He condemns First Worlders because they (by-and-large) support imperialism. He does not support imperialism. There is no contradiction here. It’s telling that, rather than actually engaging with his beliefs about First Worlders, the best response y’all can come up with is the playground insult of “I know you are but what am I”
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8993295
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9033141
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9016334
come on. you’re talking about him like conservatives used to talk about donald trump back when anyone cared about his transgressions. you could just say “oh i didn’t know he was like that” or even “he has some stupid, idiotic, reactionary takes but some of his stuff is still good”. you don’t need to make excuses for every time he says something reactionary
None of those are reactionary statements.
The claim he makes in the first image (that some people falsely claim to be part of a marginalised group for the perceived social cred and then use said marginalised status as a cudgel whenever they’re attacked) is objectively true. Have you ever heard of a Pretendian?
In the second image, BadEmpanada was talking about “POCD”, or “paedophilic obsessive-compulsive disorder”, which one of his detractors claimed to have. It is not a real diagnosis, nor should we allow would-be child rapists to portray their subhumanity as a simple mental disorder which they don’t have any responsibility over. The only treatment for paedophilia is a bullet to the head; and I am genuinely horrified that people in the comments of that post are actually running defence for those lowlives.
And the argument he makes about First World trade unions supporting imperialism is likewise correct. All one needs to do to prove this is look at the history of the labour movement in the West during World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.
you’re talking about him like conservatives used to talk about donald trump back when anyone cared about his transgressions.
The difference is that, in BadEmpanada’s case, it’s actually true. When you actually examine the essence of what he is saying as I have done instead of just looking at a thumbnail, soyfacing, and parading around as if what he is saying is self-evidently wrong like a thoughtless imbecile; it is progressive.
of course first world trade unions can act in support of imperialism. saying “don’t join a union” is a reactionary response to a very real fact. as for your first and second responses, just because you’re the same type of reactionary as badempanada doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t understand what he’s saying. communists can read and understand subtext just as well as whatever it is you are
I think Tyson is not a fair comparison with Hasan because Tyson is a sex pest along with being an endlessly irritating reddit-style dipshit. I’m sure there’s some astrophysics stuff that he’s good at, but there’s just so much downside with him all around.
If you want to hear people endlessly complain about Hasan, I’m sure you can find a good coterie over on Hexbear to satisfy that, but while I sometimes disagree with Hasan – very vociferously on some issues, in fact – I think it’s very difficult to argue that his overall output is negative when he spends so much of it on doing things like advocating against Israel and its lapdogs (which he had been doing for his whole career and not just when it became fashionable recently), along with explaining to hogs about how they are hurting themselves with false consciousness without getting too “le drumpf” about it. He does sometimes punch left, but generally he has a very deliberate policy of avoiding attacking, for example, actually revolutionary socialists despite himself advocating for a demsoc platform, which I think is a self-conscious attempt to mitigate the harm done by the way he moderates his position.
I agree that people are too fixated on talking about BE’s rancid twitter bullshit when his main channel broadly has very good videos and even his secondary channel is – while kind of dominated by drama slop – also a decent resource on things like counters to various zionist talking points, particularly their revisionist history. Not to sound like the other top comment, which I don’t really respect, but I think it is just a fact that the reason the emphasis gets slanted is because the people he disparages for his dumb chauvinist reasons on twitter have a huge demographic overlap with the online left (myself included in some cases), so people are going to take personal offense at him going out of his way for whatever brainrotted reason he thinks he has to attack them or, at the very least, people close to them. It’s a very normal reaction and part of the reason that his chauvinist axe-grinding is rhetorically a terrible strategy if he’s anything other than a shitty tailist trying to get approval from ACP types (which I don’t think he is, I think he’s just such an asshole that it undermines him having a coherent strategy).
Edit: I see your comparison was actually more direct than I thought. Over on HB people mostly complain about BE for the reason explained above. I haven’t seen many people support his really antisocial bullshit but I can see here that it’s something people do. I don’t really have an answer for you on what you actually meant except that a lot of people on the left is genuinely deeply misanthropic and they find various ways to dress up their misanthropy as righteous. You can see how people who generally were either rejected by society or oppressed by a dominant segment of it would become excessively resentful, so again I don’t think it’s really all that interesting a phenomenon. It’s just a version of “when education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.” They are hurt and currently can’t see the inadequacy in a pseudo-politics of just venting their spleen at the ingroup that made them an outgroup, even if most of the people they hate and profess to want to see the suffering of never did shit to them and are unlikely to ever do so in the future.
Tyson is a what? Goddammit. Why? I don’t really like the guy but cmon this is getting old at this point
1.Source? I legitimately hadn’t heard of this till now
- Fine, Hasan is like…idk I don’t have a good analogy now. Dammit
It was from some time ago and a major factor in a show of his getting canceled and his waned star in the current day. Here you can see what he had to say about it at the time:
https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params={"note_id"%3A10158921227506613}&path=%2Fnotes%2Fnote%2F
I’m not really sure if that’s a tracking link or where the tracking part is (though I’d guess starting from the &), I just got it from Reddit. He’s not on the magnitude of like a Weinstein or Cosby or whatever, though one of the allegations (which we don’t really have evidence for or against) is pretty grave, otherwise he’s generally just creepy.
Even without this part I still don’t think Hasan/NDT is a good analogy because, again, Tyson is famously an insufferably obtuse asshole in the vein of reddit scientism and basically doing CinemaSins for anything he can possibly think to.
Is BE still parroting the US line on Xinjiang?
I have never heard him rescind his position on that. And as is typical of him, he dug in hard in support of the genocide accusations.
