Hasan Piker, the biggest progressive political streamer in America, was detained by Customs and Border Protection for hours of questioning upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to France this weekend. Piker posted about the incident on X and later talked about it on stream.
He was detained in Chiago and questioned for two hours about protected journalistic activities like who he’s interviewed and his political beliefs. He was asked whether or not he’d interviewed Hamas, Houthis, or Hezbollah members. He was questioned about his opinions on Trump and Israel and asked about his history of bans on Twitch. His phone and laptop were not confiscated.
We literally murdered 100s of thousands prior to 9/11 and then we proceeded to murder millions of innocents after. We still deserve it.
I wouldn’t say deserve, but I’m not surprised it happened.
Here is a simple question, if Hasan did say the U.S. “deserved” 9/11 like the fear mongers in this thread are trying to twist his words into and he meant it the way y’all claim he did, wouldn’t he still be calling for more terrorism against the U.S.?
If Hasan isn’t actively calling for terrorism… what made him stop? Does he think the score was settled and it is back to U.S.-50 points vs Radical Islam -50 points on the scoreboard?
No, Hasan is clearly making a point about how blowback from brutal imperial practices becomes nearly inveitable after a certain point, the use of “deserve” he is to denote how in a system where people act as political representatives of groups and derive power from publicly representing them, the more one group commits violence against another group the more likely the group of victims are to retaliate with force.
To make the logical jump that this must mean that Hasan wants more 9/11s to happen to the U.S. where random U.S. citizens are indiscriminately killed as a symbol for something they do not control is disengenous to the extreme, and I have said elsewhere in this thread, a step in an extremely dangerous direction for the health and free speech of our society.
If you actively do something to someone, and have the prior knowledge to know what their response will be, you deserve that obvious response. If you antagonize another perpetually, you deserve their strike back. It’s not hard to follow, we literally teach this to toddlers. Violence and hate begets violence and hate, and people can only take so much before snapping.
The only people who don’t get it are maladjusted humans who were sheltered from consequences in the past.
I don’t think that we should teach toddlers, or anyone, really, that anyone ever deserves violence.
If you go around punching people for kicks, you deserve to be punched back. Especially when you refuse to listen to others who tell you that you shouldn’t punch.
Sometimes, people deserve what they directly cause. They reap what they sew. It’s the nature of the world.
Are you willfully ignorant in order to be argumentative?
We teach toddlers to have manners and act politely and treat others with respect.
The reason we have all those things is to prevent an emotional lash out from those others. We do it because we don’t know what kind of control they might have at that moment and we do our best to maintain calm. We keep the peace.
THAT is the point. Go back and read it again.
That and we had intel that such an attack was imminent and the Bush administration was okay with it bc they wanted to kill millions more.
So the ~3000 people who were killed “deserved it”? What did they do?
ETA Jesus fucking Christ, I did not expect that “mass murder is bad” would be an unpopular opinion. Y’all are genuinely disgusting and hopefully on a watchlist of some sort.
Hasan said that America deserved it, not that the 3,000 people who died in 9/11 deserved it.
Reading comprehension. Work on it.
They worked under the US, and reaped the benefits of our imperialist actions. obviously no one deserves to be murdered, but we are all culpable for the violence our nation commits, because we’re the ones keeping it running. The US deserved retaliation for what it partook in during the cold war, and that retaliation was never going to only include guilty parties.
EDIT: let me put it in another perspective: if you went to a foreign nation which operated on slavery, started working there, enjoyed the goods and services provided to you by the enslaved, and socialized with the enslavers, why would you ever expect sympathy from the enslaved? You chose who to help, who to do business with, and you chose the enslavers. It really doesn’t matter if you talked about slavery being fucked up behind closed doors, you enjoyed the value ripped from the enslaved. You’re now just as culpable as the enslavers.
Edit 2: made some edits communicating some further nuance regarding the subject. 9/11 was a tragedy, but it is largely overshadowed by the sheer scale of death our conflict with the Middle-East has had.
Would you go off yourself to stop the machine? Would you go to jail to fight for the cause? Would you sacrifice your family if it meant it would nudge anti capitalism movement?
Maybe read “Those who walk away from Omelas” and realize there’s many more productive ways to work against an oppressive nation, ranging from damaging its function to not participating in the systems which you don’t approve of.
There’s also the concept of ‘activation’, which is the slow process of learning to oppose authority in increments. It takes time to unlearn the docility the system imposes on us. Most Americans don’t even feel comfortable showing up to protests, let alone violently opposing the state.
If I die from middle eastern retaliation, I’m not gonna act surprised. If our nation was invaded, I’m not exactly gonna be lining up to volunteer defending it. We live in a country that does a vast amount of damage to the world, and I’m sick of pretending like us US citizens aren’t all small parts of the problem, because we’re letting this happen .
Jesus fuck, the political extremists have escaped the tankie containment instances
I’m an anarchist on the same instance as you are, I agree with the idea that US’s geopolitical games had to have a blowback at some point.
Should the 3000+ died? Probably not. Would someone at some point have died due to the blowback at some point? Most likely. Can’t say when or where, or how many.
But people were (understandably) seething with hatred for what America did to their nations and cultures. Removing elected leaders for autocratic dictators, assassinating people to help aid in anti-communist efforts, and so on. America was not innocent in the region pre-9/11.
The people in the towers probably had nothing to do even tangentially related to the reasons for 9/11 to be done in the eyes of the Al Queda, beyond “they are in the buildings tied to American capitalism, valid target in our eyes.”
I’m not a tankie, so I wouldn’t be on a tankie instance. Other radical views exist outside Maoism and Marxist-Leninism.
I’m not saying those 3000 people deserved to die. It is sad that they died. The US as a whole had it coming, and it would have been better if only the government or combatants were targeted. But to act like the US citizens who died on 9/11 were completely innocent bystanders is also unrealistic. It’s sad that settler families were slaughtered by native Americans, but I’m not going to act like it was completely evil that they were targeted, especially after we were slaughtering tribes en masse with our military.
Ye the Palestinians should just die already and let the last of their land be stolen by Jizzrael and the Ussa
Wow. Just… wow. That’s an extremely callous attitude.
So is our foreign policy. We live in a fucked up world. US citizens don’t deserve more respect than Middle-Eastern peoples, and far more Middle-Easterners have died unjustly prior to and after 9/11 than Americans did in 9/11. You either pretend like middle-eastern lives are without worth, become overwhelmed from the sheer amount of death, or you grow callous.