The Deprogram

Starting this by saying this is not an aggressive rebuttal but a response to points I think you validly were concerned with. Also I start to ramble I think. I am recovering from a stomach flu, so since I made the original comment I have spent all day laying in the bathroom recovering a what I can only describe as a blitzkrieg on my gut the likes of which I have never experienced before.

I hope you feel better soon. That's far more important than replying to what I said.

I will try to address what you've said, but please don't feel like you need to go back and forth, especially while sick.

Firstly, Having a lot of content being a reason for some to not do any research on the person, and/or make knee jerk reactions and dogpile a comrade, imo, is not great reasoning.

In general, I get this to a point. Yes, we can't research everything individually ourselves. We have to take others at their word to a degree. And I'm certain it's a point I've been the one making before in other contexts. However, I do think there is something unique about the context of the podcast/stream kind of format that lends itself to gossip style discourse about them. I don't know how else to describe it in this moment. When I see people talking about streamers and podcasters, whether it is defending them or criticizing, it often sounds a lot like gossip and gossip is notoriously untrustworthy and messy to manage.

In your case, I read it like you are going through this specific podcast in detail and I appreciate that. I am not saying your approach to it here is like gossip, but rather what the common take appears to be.

I will try to elaborate on what I mean because I know that's kind of vague: gossip is like, he said, she said, did you hear what they did? did you hear what they didn't do? Rumors get started through this kind of thing and it can spin out of control if left unchecked.

How can we approach this differently, in general? The most important point I can think of is to not over-generalize in one direction or another. What exactly are they doing? What did they do recently that is worthy of praise? What have they done that is worthy of criticism? I am not saying people need to have essay length back and forths every time they bring up a streamer or podcaster. The opposite if anything. A single sentence saying a thing like your, "JT [one of the hosts of The Deprogram?] did stuff with CPUSA for some time" is already more informative than "The Deprogram is trustworthy" or "The Deprogram is bad".

You bring up Hasan at one point. I would say that my views are of Hasan not being that great. This is through contact of what the general populace here feels, and also his content gets posted enough to back up him being inflammatory and kind of a shit. It is also true he has good takes as well. Being critical when proof is present is valid and good. Being critical based on a vague accusation on a group one has little knowledge of, not so much.

I think in a way this proves my point though about the difficulty of discerning. You can correct me if this is a factually incorrect read: From the way your describe it, your view of The Deprogram is based on watching them with a certain amount of thoroughness and getting a profile sense of what they are like. But your view of Hasan appears to be the opposite, one of having a vague impression based on how others talk about him and brief clips that people share of "bad takes".

I find this to hold true with some consistency here from anecdotal observation, that those who watch a podcaster/streamer with regularity are more apt to defend them and those who only see them as a few clips and a brief impression are more apt to be critical. Supposing I am correct in that observation and it's not just me falling prey to confirmation bias or something, what are we supposed to do about it?

Looping back to what I said before about straightforward information, it may be that we need to prioritize informing each other in simple ways, and from the other direction, trying to keep criticism to specific incidents unless we can make a thorough case against someone/entity. Maybe "so and so seems trustworthy" or "so and so seems like an ultra" is enough for a group of friends, but I'm not sure it's enough for media entities and the like.

Not all of us are great at recalling specific details over general impressions, which may be part of the problem. But I think we still have to try.

I know that doesn't address every point you made, but it seemed like the most important to go over and my response is already long.