Lefties and personal material wealth, haha!

Dunno how many of you know who Aaron Bastani is, so we’ll start with a brief and hopefully fair pen-picture.  Bastani is highly articulate, apparently well-read, and sharp.  He’s in the category I tend to describe as “honest lefties”: with notable blind-spots and a distorted worldview (usually a variant of sub-marxism), they’ll nevertheless generally bow to truth and logic when confronted inescapably.  (The code for this is that they’ve noticed something is “problematic” – i.e. sits very awkwardly with their worldview, making them deeply uncomfortable, exactly because they feel the force of the logic and the truth.)

Plus, Bastani is a tough cookie, a serious and driven entrepreneur who Gets Things Done: notably, his impressive Novara Media creation, now a burgeoning mini-empire of alternative media.  At the start of this project, his purposeful and businesslike conduct could have been labelled “social entrepreneurship”, but it must now fast be reaching the point where he can start to cash in, if he wants to.  (His commitment to leftism is clearly intellectual rather than temperamental, and he has many very traditional conservative traits: enthusiasm for family & becoming a house owner; married in church; etc etc.)

And now, hahah! he gets to interview “The World’s Biggest Political Streamer“, Turkish-American Hasan Piker, “arguably the most influential political voice on livestreaming service Twitch“.  Mr Piker, we very quickly realise, makes a shedload of money from his own ultra-successful leftie media activity.

Bastani is just wide-eyed & drooling with pleasure at talking to this guy.   54 minutes in, he gets to ask his new friend about … his big, new, nice-part-of-LA *ahem* mansion and his costly new electric Porsche.   Now to be fair to Bastani, he does kinda try to get his man to justify such expenditures; but boy, he let’s him off the hook easily.  They quickly agree that the Red Line is, never to become a landlord …  oh, and not to have three Porches – “that would be ridiculous!“.  Right, right.  Everyone should have nice things that are within their means “… as long as your morals are not compromised.“  Ah yes, of course.

It’s just so funny.  Because it looks for all the world like Bastani is casting for arguments as to how he’s gonna justify his own Porche in a year or two’s time.  Go for it, Aaron!  You know that a part of you is  capitalist, really.

ND