Personally, I was a left liberal for all my life, but had kinda looked into the abyss of anti-sjw and gamergate stuff, like watching Sargon and Bearing, but hadn't really subscribed to their beliefs, more putting them on as background chatter.

Things changed when I read manufacturing consent, listened to Chomsky and found Chapo at around the end of 2018, at which point I found myself as more an ancom, but Chomsky's talking points on Leninism and the USSR was never as cogent and didn't make as much sense as his other points, so I held skepticism about my beliefs then.

Reading more on theory and history, and looking more into different left tendencies via channels like Rev Left moved me over to be a Marxist, as it made the most sense to me in explaining the current and historical situation. Currently making my way through Lenin and looking more into historical ML states and I've found that I'm pretty comfortable as just a Marxist with ML tendencies rn.

  • MrBidenYourFired [he/him]
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    I spent a lot of time fucking around at my local library in my middle school years (mostly because of free wifi) and ended up stumbling upon some Richard Dawkins stuff, not that his books are necessarily political but I did start questioning things I had previously just assumed to be correct about life, there's a lot of stuff in there not just about religion but about skepticism in general. The most exposure to politics I got was when my parents watched the Today show back when "handsy Matt Lauer" was still there. Probably in 8th grade I got into the Colbert report, which was back when there were at least some truth to power segments rather than perpetual DNC/lib media nonsense. Like many teens I was attracted to the libertarian worldview mostly because of their views on social issues but realized pretty quickly their economic views were insane. Pretty much all throughout the Obama years I was a standard lib, believing that Obama always did things for the right reasons and any criticism was unfounded. It wasn't until I took AP government my senior year of high school that I began to have second thoughts about shitlib mentality. IIRC my teacher asked us what we thought about Bernie Sanders running for president (this was back in 2015 when he announced he was running for the first time) and the general consensus was nobody knew who he was and his campaign was a joke. But then my dad (who is a conservative republican) for some inexplicable reason thought it would be fun to take me to a Bernie rally later that year and after listening to him speak I actually understood, and volunteered for him as I did in 2020. It wasn't until i started college that I got into Chomsky and socialist/communist theory, and honestly I'm still not as well-read on that stuff as I'd like to be, but suffice to say I no longer subscribe to the incrementalist shitlib view of the world where capitalism is the ultimate and final economic system and must be preserved at all cost.