Yes, I know we're mostly actually :LIB: here but for the sake of discussion let's pretend otherwise.
I'll start. I left behind a very right wing upbringing, the kind that had family members that openly expressed sympathy and support for nazis, said "the wrong side won the war" and even believed that "science" would have been far more advanced if only a certain WW1 veteran and painter had his way through the 1940s. I left it behind, but I brought much unexamined ideology with me. :zizek:
For most of my college years, I was an alienated and insufferably smug neoliberal that didn't even know there were options between "respectful conservatives" like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Clinton-era liberals. I assumed that older leftist movements had simply ceased to exist and were no longer relevant so I didn't think much about them. Most of my opinions and hopes for the future were shaped by whatever pie in the sky post-Extropian hopium dealers I hopped between, from Kurzweil to worse.
Some of my takes were so bad I feel reluctant to share them, even here, even now. I will say that I once believed that the only real problem with eugenics was that society would push back and the controversy would sabotage the "good" it would do. I also, naturally, had such a preoccupation with death cheating and life extension bargaining-phase coping with young adult existential dread that I saw depopulation as another necessary evil that would have unfortunate society-wide pushback. There would have to be a lot less people if the ones that lived forever were going to be around forever, at least until the near-infinite bounty of asteroid mining and such came about.
I had many post-911 :brainworms: as well. I was simultaneously a believer in compromise as a solution to almost any disagreement but also had my mind shut to anything other than the conservative-liberal false dichotomy. Whatever those scary Muslims were up to, if it wasn't friendly to the United States, it was certainly a threat to civilization itself had had to be stopped no matter the cost, tragic as that was. :liberalism:
I was involved with the New Atheist movement for most of my college years and young adulthood, and my disillusionment really didn't set in until Dawkins' "Dear Muslima" letter and once I stumbled upon the realization of what a quack Sam Harris is and always was.
So-called "futurology" conferences that I used to enthusiastically be a part of started to get bought out by billionaires under pretense of hosting and sponsorship, and when the military started shoving its way in to some of the venues I used to be interested in, I checked out.
During and after college, I worked to survive. Work taught me sympathy for my fellow workers, and it also taught me that my bosses weren't particularly good at anything but had the power. That got me started on a new path.
It wasn't a single event but a process, and I'm still on the path I started to take.
I wept when other kids broke trees or were cruel to other people or animals, and I guess it just evolved from there.
I was like that too.
I went down a weird path that almost drove that out of me, but it never fully left, fortunately.
Unlike most here I'm not white. I grew as a poor browm kid, who then went into school and got placed in classes with rich white who probably were definitely racists. So I've always just been left leaning. Only really got rid of my liberal brain worms once Bernie ran in late 2015
I appreciate you admitting to your :frothingfash: roots and how you burned them away with theory. :solidarity:
i was nothing, really. when i was a kid my grandma got to me and made me a commie. but during teen years i kinda had a period where i didnt know what to believe anymore and i was super confused by puberty and transness and couldnt feel emotions anymore so the minimum empathy required for being a commie wasnt there.
but i got my shit together and went back to grandma and she was right the whole time so we just bonded over how stupid her kids are. she says her mistake with them is she was maybe to gungho about communism when she was younger and they thought it was silly.
i love my grandma so much. she didnt know much about lgbt people before and was a sort of 'they do them' kinda attitude about it. now she hits family members with newspaper or with a paper towel roll if they disrespect me on that
she recently mentioned that shes been talking with a lot of old ladies in czechia about how im trans and how its good to accept such things. shes a good bean
It is genuinely heartwarming to know that some older folks are comrades. :fidel-salute-big:
she was a pretty big labor boss (dealt with the mechanization of agriculture) in czechoslovakia days. before that she worked in a munitions factory that shipped to vietnam. always was a hardliner :soviet-heart:
i tell her i have a communist community on the internet that knows about her and shes just all like 'good, communism must be encouraged among the youth and im glad i still can do it'
what a quack Sam Harris is and always was
That guy gave me some severe whiplash, lol. For a while I thought he was a cool pro-science epic debate guy. A couple years later I tuned into his podcast again and he was straight up talking about race science. I had to reevaluate some things that day.
"There is more science in a single New York zip code than in all of the recorded history of Islam" was one of the most :what-the-hell: things he ever said.
It doesn't even make sense, even as an incorrect claim. A zip code is an area. The science, how is it quantified? For how long? It's so stupid that it makes my brain overheat trying to make sense of it when that quack never bothered.
Western science even owes a lot to the Islamic scholars in the golden age.
We ran into the same wall around the same time I think with the new-atheist crowd. The reactionary radicalization of those communities happened so fucking fast. Yes looking back they were always shitty but it went from mostly harmless bashing of the kookier aspects of religious fundamentalism to overt fascist shit in the span of a couple months.
as a preteen I was a The Sims capitalist, founded on the beliefs that a) you can work hard all the time and it won't impact you physically/emotionally, and b) this work will be reliably rewarded. both derived from playing probably over 1k hours each of TS2 and TS3. incredible that this is something grown ass adults believe, sometimes without even having played The Sims
I did similarly horrible things in the older Civilization and SimCity games and drew similar conclusions.
funnily enough I was always about as left wing as simcity lets you be just from being :ukkk: instead of :amerikkka:. looking at the "free clinics" policy and being confused as to why it'd be off by default + toggleable at all
Mostly lib. But tbh, I always kinda leaned leftist and just didn't know anything about it, having not been exposed to actual leftism. (I'm in my late 30s btw).
I remember as a kid of like 10 or something asking my mom and grandpa what communism was. And they were explaining to me that it was a system of government where everything was shared. To their credit, they didn't paint it with the brush of total horror and complete evil that I would later encounter from most other people, but they did try to explain to me that it turned out bad and that it just inevitably always does. But I remember specifically being like.. "wtf? Why is that bad? That sounds like the way things should be." I'd press them on what happened and how it turned out "bad" and the answer was that it was complicated, i.e., they didn't know.
In high school in the 90s, our civ/econ teacher who was rumored on campus for being a communist, which was more a weird novelty than an evil thing, gave us a political compass test. I thought it was brilliant that there was a whole other axis to the usual right-left paradigm. And sure enough, with the answers I gave, I scored as being pretty much at the far left bottom. "Anarchism" was still just "chaos, no rules, punks with mohawks!" and absolutely not a coherent ideology, so I certainly did not equate it with my political compass test, which just told me I was "anti-authoritarian libertarian." I didn't think too much more about it, but you have to understand, this was the 90's, the end of history, pre 9/11.
(How I wish I could go back and actually talk to and learn something from that old commie econ/civics teacher. Among many other things, one question would be like... how he was even able to keep his job when it was an open secret he was a communist?)
I got sucked into the new atheism thing in the early 00's, and thought that was the future of political thought. (Yeah, I cringe at myself for that now). But when the great split happened, in part due to elevatorgate (btw, it's cool to see Rebecca Watson get posted here sometimes), I was firmly and fervently on the pro-SJW side. I couldn't believe the vileness and bigotry that had been lurking that whole time in the movement I thought was going to be the culture war that was eventually going to end right wing stupidity. Still identified as a liberal of course, as I did when Obama was campaigning. I was reading Christopher Hitchens and learning that he was a Trotskyist, something I had only vaguely been aware of as something having to do with politics and the Soviet Union (which was of course ruled by a repressive totalitarian regime, as everyone knew). I thought Noam Chomsky was extremely cool too. I started reading wsws.org, who my lib dad introduced me to. He was also reading books about Che Guevara and I respected his (my dad's) political opinions, as I had since back when I had gone to anti-war (first gulf war) protests with him as a little kid.
Anyway, I started thinking of myself as a Trotskyist, mostly because I didn't know a goddamn thing about any of it, but was realizing communism was good actually, but that it must have been corrupted because again, everyone knows Stalin bad. Mao pretty bad. Fidel? Fidel must be bad, because no freeze peach etc. If Che had lived, then all would have been good though.
But then I started reading. And I started watching people online who were actual communists arguing. (And I just want to say here, I still think arguing with people online IS A GOOD THING TO DO. It doesn't matter if who you're arguing with will never be convinced or won over, but people silently watching, the lurkers like me, are recognizing the valid arguments. It makes a difference. But that's a complete tangent.)
And I won't go into the next decade and a half, except to say that I ended up here. Also that I'm rather drunk and also going through withdrawal from other drugs so this is just a long, rambling, boring wall of text that no one gives a shit about, understandably. It might not even make sense. But it was kinda fun looking back while typing. So thanks for asking UlyssesT.
Your story was weirdly inspiring to me. Thank you for writing it. :sankara-salute:
Aww. Well, cool. I'm not sure how, but I'm glad it was. Cheers comrade. :rosa-salute: And thanks again for the thread, it has been really illuminating reading the responses.
this is just a long, rambling, boring wall of text that no one gives a shit about
It's a long rambling wall of text that I care about comrade :ancom-heart:
Thank you comrade. This is a late reply, but I just wanted it to be known that I really appreciated reading that. :heart-sickle:
Came from family of Jesse Jackson democrats, was always consistent on anti-imperialism, social democracy, wanted the US to adopt the NHS model, very basic lib.
Got very excited about Obama, but believed he was moderating himself to become electable, that he was a secret socdem.
He got elected and was as bad as Bush, and that got me to think about politics in terms of greater or lesser disappointment.
The Bernie Campaign reminded me that politics could be about demanding things you actually want. Started calling myself a socialist (lol).
Got pipelined by Socialist Alternative, learned all the Trot lines, but then realized that the org was hella undemocratic and didn't really do anything besides campaign for failed reforms and politicians.
The alternative in town were the anarchists and I haven't looked back.
I grew up apolitical but always lib-leaning due to background radiation of California and then became a 4chan edgelord borderline fascist and became really disillusioned when I realized the majority of the people around me believed some stupid ass shit (nofap will not give you super powers, wtf?) and were generally just stupid, cruel people
like my older brother has been posting on 4chan since like 2005 and he always was kind of conservative (which I always found strange) and slowly became more and more fascist and around the Trump election was always talking about how awesome Trump was going to be and all that edgy Nazi shit and talking about how there is hope because of "Gen Zyklon" and he used to wear a Nazi hat and stuff around the house and he kind of bullied me into adopting some of his more extreme views and I went through a period of pretty severe introspection a little while later and started to drift back to some of the stuff I believed a little bit in highschool (one of my friends is from Finland and constantly bludgeoned me about how socdem is best and how USA is shit, it always kind of stuck with me) and my older brother became extremely abusive in response (though he always was, I just didn't really pick up on it) and it just caused me to become lost and search for answers
Over like the next two years I slowly started to lose some of the stupid ass brainworms I gained from spending all day jacking off and browsing /pol/ (also I generally started to realize that yes, me not being white is a hindrance) and eventually I joined group that just happened to be leftbook and I usually got ratioed when I said some stupid shit and most people there were genuinely nicer than most right wing douchebags
I eventually got in touch with my friend from Finland after not talking with him for ages and I tried to act like I used to before I got brainworms and he was like, "election is coming up, who are you voting for? I'm watching this one because it looks crazy, Americans are so dumb" and he eventually linked me to the JRE episode with Bernie and I really liked what Bernie had to say (esp. with regards to when he started going on about deaths of despair because I was pretty close to becoming one of those lmao) and I kinda wrestled with that for a while and became more and more disgusted with fascists and everything around me and then when the Floyd Riots kicked off, I don't even remember how or why but I wound up watching the livestreams (I think it's because I had seen an anticapitalist meme on FB and was like "hey that's true", and then started following that page) and it really radicalized me like crazy, I used to think antifa were crybabies but I saw some insane shit on those livestreams and I was like "holy shit if they're right about police brutality what else are they right about?"
I had actually read Marx as part of a class I took for general ed a few weeks before that and I loved it but I didn't really think "wow, I'm on the left now" until I was watching those livestreams like 10 hours a day
I think I probably always would have wound up like this, I have always hated bullies, and I have had experiences in my life that humanized lots of people who are normally demonized. One of my only friends in elementary school was a foster kid (who opened my eyes to classism, I remember he told me the other white people didn't like him because he was "trailer trash" and that while the Mexicans didn't fully accept him because he was white at least they didn't look down on him for being poor) and I had another friend who was a very sensitive and intelligent person who fell into multiple drug addictions along with having been in tons of remedial classes and interacting with all the black kids who got constantly harassed by the school police and realizing most of them were fucked up but also really fucking funny and for the most part normal people
I was pretty lib in high school though I had "haha communism funny memes" phase, I was sucked into the edgy libertarian atheist (facts and logic types) after graduating but then veered leftwards after that. I learned more about the problems in the world and eventually realized that it's not because of a few bad apples but the whole system that's bad
I was also an almost comically edgy atheist. I would go to church, listen to sermons, and then go up and argue with the priest afterwards. That may or may not have been related to my crush on one of the sincere churchgoers. :cringe: Needless to say my journey leftwards was due to unrelated reasons.
It disturbs me how many New Atheists I knew after the turn of the century found their way (further) rightward and some became "cultural Christians" or even Qanon cultists last I checked. :desolate:
I went through a few phases as a teenager, from basic "I don't care about politics" to anti SJW (I spent too long looking at men's rights Instagram pages), then I saw a few videos by Ellen Rose about feminism which completely flipped the switch for me, made me realise what kind of sexual harrasment and degradation women face. From there I became a socdem, I thought that everyone should have the opportunity to become a millionaire if they worked hard enough (lol), but to do that everyone needed to have a certain amount of rights provided for them. I also believed that countries in Africa and south America were poor because of corrupt governments, and believed in western imperialism installing nice governments that are good for the people. Between a lot of bullying from my communist friend and joining Chapo because I thought 30-50 feral hogs was funny, I gradually became a communist. Finally read some theory and now I call myself a Marxist-Leninist
