For context: People are claiming that Hasan Piker shocked his dog with a shock collar on stream for basically no reason and got very mad at him. He put out a video showing her collar for 0.001 seconds in the world's most awkward hand grip and saying it was clearly a vibration collar and his enemies are trying to ruin his life as they always do. People including myself are still suspicious.
I looked at the allegations in this video myself a little, and I won't swear to the model numbers or anything but it all sounds right to me. You may need to pause the video to look at his images, he scrolls past them irritatingly quickly. There does however definitely look to me to be tape on the back of that thing. This is from Hasan's explanation stream where he showed the collar:
Click to see the raw image and zoom it, and you'll see pretty clearly that most of the box is shiny dark black plastic with bright white highlights, and then there's a clear off-kilter rectangle of something that's matte dark grey instead, without much in the way of highlights. You can also see vague shadows of two little circular things that could be prong sockets covered by tape or could just be weird compression artifacts or something.
Here it is with contrast adjusted:
You can see the rectangle of the tape, and then some kind of distortion at the top that might be a prong socket, and a pretty clear circular shape at the bottom that definitely looks like it could be one.
In another part of the video you can see that circular part under the tape even more clearly. Look between his fingers to see the clear circular shape, you can even see wrinkles in the tape around the circular protrusion:
Yes, I'm already aware that the Hasan stans will say I'm making all this up and it's not there and they don't see anything. Anyway, that's what it is. If I did my math right, those frames are from https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2586575954 and the timestamps are, respectively for the three images:
- 43:58.396
- 44:09.292
- 44:09.333
Somebody inform reddit, the drama must flow.
I posted a video a little while back, of a trans person who came in Hasan's stream and said that they disagreed with his handling of trans issues. He booted them from the chat and started these wild personal insults against them (as did a lot of his chat).
You know, like a perfectly reasonable person.
It's somewhere in here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdCFycPw3fI
Like I say, the source of the information means nothing to me. It's all untrustworthy. I would want to look and double-check a lot of the information first regardless (unless it was a highly trusted source somehow). Actually, for a lot of this Kaya stuff, I made sure to grab the source video where I could directly from Hasan's pages, so I could look around and see more of the context (and be sure it's not some kind of deepfake, although that seems highly unlikely.)
And yes, I'm probably getting a one-sided picture. Do you want to send me something which is Hasan making some really clear and important argument that I really need to hear? Or just his normal day-to-day coverage of the flotilla or the European Gaza protests that are going on right now? Happy to take a look at that stuff, too.
No, i'm looking for literally anyone you think is a good representation of your geopolitical perspective that might better inform what you consider "someone who knows what they're talking about".
You've only shared content of piker responding to twitch chat, which is certainly evocative but not helpful in supporting your claim that 'he doesn't know what he's talking about'. I could certainly share an example of his geopolitical stance that I think is well-supported, but I'm really just trying to gain a better understanding of your worldview beyond the reaction slop you keep pointing to.
Oh, so a different thing from someone qualified coming in and trying to help Hasan understand and him treating them as the enemy and him and all his chat going on a wild tear of insulting them and tearing them down instead of spending even a moment hearing out what they have to say.
Got it. You should have said you were interested in that totally separate question. On geopolitics I like Noam Chomsky, Rachel Maddow, Al Jazeera, Bellingcat, Tim Snyder... kind of hard to list out individual people on the spot, but those are some random ones that come to mind who deal with global issues who I generally will trust their judgement because I've seen them be right a lot in the past. Almost any perspective I can appreciate as long as it seems like it's coming from an honest place, but those are some where I actually feel pretty firmly aligned with the person's viewpoint or the overall editorial viewpoint. Then there are specific people (Dan Ellsberg, John Perkins) who have some kind of unique insight into a specific element of geopolitics that I think is valuable to include in my overall picture.
I strongly dislike the reaction slop. This stuff is that, sure, and I'm only reacting to it because they seem like they're bringing receipts, the topic is important, and the counterargument from Hasan's side is so transparently dishonest that it doesn't really convince me that he's not guilty. But I'm limited to those people for my picture of Hasan, I think, because that's the only ecosystem where he is really active and so those are the only people in a position to criticize him. That's why I asked you for some of his exemplary work on geopolitics so I can take a look at it, and judge it in the same light that I would those names I listed earlier.
How are you coming to the conclusion that they are "someone qualified"? Maybe there's more to that interaction that you clipped out of the video - i have no idea
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.
If this were true then you wouldn't be spending so much emotional energy weighing in on it.