I never get tired of 'em. I know we've discussed this before. I know the process is ongoing, not necessarily based on a single event, and depends a lot on your position in society. If discussing the radicalization of others, don't mention any methods unless people specifically told you that certain things radicalized them.

For me, I was a left-liberal for most of my life. Long story short, I ran in a state senate election trying to be as friendly to everyone as possible. The one thing I really wouldn't budge on was universal health care, since I knew from experience that it worked. I lost my election BADLY to a guy who ran on no platform at all, although he had much better name recognition. I worked so hard on that campaign and really was devastated and had to look for answers. Stupid as it sounds, at around that time I found the r/chapotraphouse subreddit and started listening to the podcast. That led to me listening to much better podcasts (like Revleft Radio), reading actual theory, and giving up on the Chapo podcast entirely once Bernie lost the last primary.

I'm always trying to radicalize others but I just usually get nowhere. George Floyd's death plus coronavirus I think resulted in a lot of people reconsidering things, but it seems like many of them have kind of swung back in the other direction now, at least as far as I can tell from watching my friends on Facebook. I've been arguing with my lib dad for months about all of this shit, with the result that he has actually gotten much better at deflecting Marxist points than the average lib lol. Sometimes I can get him to admit that everything is fucked and that Marxism is the only answer, at other times he'll say that we need to make friends with local business owners (some of the worst fucking people in the universe) and not alienate them.

Anyway, if you feel like writing your radicalization story or the radicalization stories of others, I'm happy to read.

  • ComradeMikey [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    funny my anthro class absolutely trashed any sort of it as unscientific lmao

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

      funny my anthro class absolutely trashed any sort of it as unscientific lmao

      well it depends which part

      for example, it's undebatable fact that many people in Europe share maternal and/or paternal markers with people in Botswana or Japan or w/e. (True for any region not just europe)

      Also, the current "European race" was only formed after a violent bronze age conquest and mass mixing from the east, with a complete replacement of paternal ancestry in a literal Columbus-American style takeover

      These and other facts could easily be used to show the inherent mixedness of various peoples (especially Europeans). Instead we get shitty fash-adjacent tests from ancestry.com that support the current propaganda paradigm.

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

          Right, or at least "Yamnaya" migration, since we have no evidence of what language they spoke (but a whole shitton of genetic evidence shows a tight association between the two)

          this migration, and the discovery of these fossils were so central to European racial politics it's hard to overemphasize it

          For instance, the redefinition of the word Caucasian? It literally means "of the Caucasus", so why did it get redefined to mean Europeans? Well, COINCIDENTALLY, these Yamnaya (formerly called Pit Grave) fossils were found shortly before this change took place--and they were found right by the Caucasus.

          So it was likely a cope, similar to how Know-Nothings (basically Trumpers of the 1800s) called white anglos "Native Americans". Or how the viking meme COINCIDENTALLY only took off 2 years after Sweden lost Finland in the Finnish War. They wanted to connect Europe to the Caucasus, because it was already known that these "Indoeuropeans" originated much of Europe's culture, and we can't have foreigners originating our culture--something like that.

          Then there's the appropriated word "Aryan", and the equally appropriated swastika, which was such a huge cope that it literally made 60 million europeans kill each other.

          As well as endless LARPing of anglo-germanics as "nordic Aryans", which continues today even though the pigmentation genes of these Yamnaya have been confirmed to be in frequencies that are seen in modern Pakistan/Northern India--in other words they were Brown.

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

        ok sure my issue is when people extrapolate that stuff to mean anything. They try to essentialize mass groups of people using traits that aren’t connected to certain outcomes. you cant look at someones jaw line and go ah thats a X race group they are more athletic or more intelligent.

        sure they may identify gene groups now the question is for practical use does that relate to the social construct of race and do either have impact. in my studies it was unanimously no. most anthropologists say racial identifiers aren’t indicative of alot of these abstract implications of say disposition or intelligence, and that culture often has far more to play than the construct of race on physical performance etc.

        i just wanna add on that im not dismissing the nature’s impact but they aren’t linked to race, there is more diversity in genetic variation within cultures than between them

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

          you cant look at someones jaw line and go ah thats a X race group they are more athletic or more intelligent.

          A big part of eurocentrism is that europeans are studied 10000x more than anybody else.

          You probably believe some racist anthro myths yourself. For example, I'd bet that 90% of this website believes that Europeans are uniquely lactose tolerant.

          But the reality is that there are plenty of other ethnoracial groups that are highly lactose tolerant--they just have different genes that code for the same thing (Indians/Pakistanis, Arabs, Tibetans, Tutsi/Fulani/Tuareg/Nuba/Hadza/plenty of others across Africa). And moreover, Eastern/Southern Europeans have low rates. Again, the myth still persists

          So what ends up happening is people say "Europeans are more X" where they looked for the genes for X extensively in Euros, but not in other groups.

          And of course individual people can be anything for most traits, these are just tendencies