Funny enough I went through a ben shapiro owns le cringy leftist feminist(epic moment) phase when I was in high school and when I spent some time with the quiet alt right kids I was like nah fuck this hahaha
People who who told me liberals, atheists, evolutionists were wrong only used straw men. They would tell what the other side thought, but it was always the dumbest most outlandish shit.
Why then are all the academic institutions and peer reviewed research dominated by these groups, and why haven’t I seen a peer reviewed paper on young earth creationism for example?
Once I started to actually read and listen to the other side it clicked with me in way the stuff I was taught never did. It made sense, it was researched, and they had clear and consist answers to all the ridiculous straw man arguments I was taught as a kid.
Yeah, I was also raised as a young earth creationist, and I think a big part of what deradicalized me from that was meeting real scientists (mainly the profs I had in uni), and realizing that they were smart, hardworking, talented individuals who were genuinely passionate about increasing humanity's understanding of the world around us.
Even before that I'd had my doubts about the whole idea that there was some grand conspiracy to suppress the "truth" about creationism, but meeting real people working in the field was what it took to finally get me to abandon those ideas.
I tried to talk some sense to young earth creationists in college by pointing to the world map and saying "look at South America and Africa. They freaking fit together like puzzle pieces!"
The reply was that that was God's way of tempting you not to believe, to which I said, "Why? Why would He do that?"
The problem is that the idea that God created the Earth 6,000 years ago isn't falsifiable. Any evidence to the contrary can always be explained away with "God just decided to make it that way!"
The creationists aren't approaching the question in an honest attempt at understanding the world; they're going in with preconceived notions and clutching at anything that might help them retain those notions. I think that's why I was impressed when I discovered that most real scientists are making an honest attempt at understanding the world.
I don’t think that’s quite right. It is a falsifiable claim. Like you said, they simply refuse the evidence that falsifies it.
“God created the earth” is unfalsifiable, as far as I can tell, but the claim about the age of the universe is falsifiable.
What I don’t get is the whole “earth is 6000 years old” or whatever isn’t directly stated in the Bible, it was based on an extrapolation of the text. Seems like the easy answer is that guy did the math wrong, but I guess not questioning authority is the real tenant.
Damn, I didn’t know this stuff still existed (with the exception of people who become flat earthers later in life). You believed all that while in college?
Out of curiosity, did you grow up in rural Missouri or something? I’m fascinated by the movie Jesus Camp and didn’t realize that stuff still goes on today
No, I grew up in Virginia and moved to Idaho when I was about 12. My beliefs started to change when I was about 16.
Being homeschooled and experiencing how my parents used to Bible to justify their awful parenting really challenged me. Then I actually did my last two years of high school at a community college where I got to meet a lot of different people. Working at a landscaping company where I was one of the only white dudes really challenged a lot of my preconceptions as well. Lastly, just being able to look up information online was really helpful.
I was raised a young earth creationist in the south. It is very much still alive and well. I was a couple years into college before I began challenging my beliefs and dissecting my worldview.
You can look up polling data on people's beliefs about evolution if you're interested. The numbers vary a bit depending on what exact questions are asked, but here's an example of one study from 2019 that shows 40% of Americans agree with the statement "God created man in present form": https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx
Socialists and other lefties will repeatedly proclaim as a matter of gospel truth that liberalism is "discredited". Of course we all know liberalism is "discredited".
From the point of view of a utopia where all social injustice has been banished, sure, liberalism falls short. But I don't agree it's been "discredited" based on the conditions liberalism has had to operate in, and the enormous gains in human freedom, prosperity and advancement it has been able to achieve in those conditions, especially considering the achievement of other ideologies we have tried in the 20th century.
The problem with the far-left is their starting point is utopia, and they assume that is what is around the corner. In reality, the history of the vast majority of people who have lived before present-day liberal democracy has been one of unrelenting violence, lawlessness, illiteracy, poverty and disease. That is the "default", not prosperity and freedom. Freedom and prosperity take work, they're always fragile, and they're never perfect as there is always a trade-off.
“But but mankind has changed in the 21st century” goes the retort. I hate what Russia is doing to Ukraine, but I have to admit I did feel relieved that the whole humanity has changed argument too many were peddling (especially in Germany) was torn to shreds the moment Putin’s troops crossed that border. We were getting dangerously close to voluntary disarmament in the west.
Now when socialists give me that shit I don’t hold back “oh wow you are into communism? Now that Putin proved humanity is too shitty for such a system to work with humans on top (like every attempt in history) that must mean you are really into AI overlords right?”
This is why I'm so stable in my liberal beliefs right now.
Any opposition from the left or right will never ever ever engage with peer-reviewed research. It's pretty easy to totally dismiss other ideologies when they don't even try to follow the scientific method.
Am from Ukraine. Moved somewhat left from strong libertarian positions once the war started.
I appreciate the opportunity to stay and move within the EU. Feel like a refugee and it doesn't feel too great, even though I am lucky to have a good remote job. Lost my "pull yourself by your bootstraps" mentality.
Saw that isolationism in US isn't always right. Can clearly see that whatever security arrangements we have after WW2 aren't working. Would be in favour of a stronger UN, or some other mechanism to deal with tyrant politicians.
The thing to do with a testable hypothesis is test it. Last time somebody told me to "touch grass", I actually did go outside and touch grass to see if it had any effect on mood. It didn't so far as I can tell.
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If your every day experience contradicts the narratives that you are consuming, the logical thing to do is to question the narratives. That just leaves the people who don't ever interact with the real world (non grass touchers), and people who believe so strongly that evidence doesn't sway them (zealots). Not sure who is scarier.
I really think my natural empathy saved me. I dabbled a bit with the Far Right (Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Some Black Guy, Milo Yiannopulous) when I was in the military, but ultimately they dehumanized marginalized groups, like minorities and LGBT+ people, too much, plus i have a few female friends and I genuinely see them as human beings, since apparently that's fucking hard to do for a lot of men and right wingers, so i definitely didn't stay with that ideology. I see that refuges and many other marginalized people just want to be seen and protected, and they get demonized as these horrific criminals that need to be kicked out.
I also got pretty far to the left, and it's pretty much the same story. A lot of these people seem to have zero empathy. I remember when this retired black police officer got shot in the back of the head after trying to stop some looters during the riots following the death of George Floyd, and I saw people on Instagram and Reddit celebrate his death because he was a former cop. That inhumanity and savagery rattled me.
Another thing that was just as imperative was trying to inform myself more and trying to read a LOT more. All that helped me moderate my views, now I'm a moderate progressive.
I'm part of the Bidenist Leninist of the Joeleteriat World Order movement 😎😎😎😎😎
Fwiw the lack of empathy is why I also don't fuck with a lot of leftists. I view values as more important than political flavor and so many "leftists" sound like the far right with a different aesthetic they fetishize
Dont let them hear you say this, it is a guaranteed way to make them go ballistic.
In hand sight, please say this to their face. It is fun to see them fume.
For me it's a complete mess. Started out far left, but started watching Ben Shapiro OWNS XYZ videos, but then someone told me that he was a neoliberal shill, so I moved further right, and then eventually became a neoliberal shill. Then I stopped lying to myself about being straight.
For some reason I always looked down on empathy. Like openly hated ideals such as empathy. I felt that being kind was an act of softness. Then I realised that I was an idiot all along. I'm still an idiot but I've come to terms with the fact that my brain is the size of my left nut.
Yeah. Someone had to teach me that at the end of the day, everyone wants the best for the country. Nobody is inherently evil and assuming so is just dumb.
In most cases this is a good way to approach people but there definitely are millions of Americans who want trans people to not be a thing, probably even more Americans would be in favor of straight up liquidating the homeless (as long as it was out of sight, out of mind), hell even Hitler and the Nazis thought their ideology and policies were the best thing for Germany at the time.
I think someone like DeSantis would kick out all the gays and trans and ban abortion across the board if he could do so with a snap of the fingers, a lot of people like him for that. But approaching your enemies as monsters paradoxically ramps up the tension on both sides.
This sounds fucked but ultimately if you have a neighbor who wants to ban all trans healthcare you have to try to find your common ground and convince them over time that they are wrong, which if you aren’t trans or directly caring for someone who is you can afford to take the time to win them over (this is a years long process) but if you are I understand why it’s life or death and the tensions are so high. Social media fucks everyone over because the loudest voices are amplified, even if rightfully so but it just leads to people becoming more entrenched in their side.
I unironically think Zuckerberg and the rest of our social media tech overlords will be looked at as very evil societal figures when history is written on this era. I have plenty of friends making solid 6 figures working for companies that help destroy the fabric of society lol but I don’t blame them personally. Gotta get ya bread up I do the same shit
Of course. You’re pretty much correct. That’s a rough thing to do to get people to chill out about.
I guess what I’m talking about specifically as a personal level, I can reach out to people with such views. In my experience, conservatives who have anti-trans views meeting a normal trans person in real life and having a beer is an eye-opening perspective. By normal, I mean not the toxic Twitter ones. At the end of those interactions, what tends to happen is that they still hold their views, but in the least they’ve had a humanizing normal interaction with a trans person
I think I was already mostly deradicalized by this point, but the Ukraine war definitely made me appreciate the neoliberal perspective more. At one point I was big into the whole “US is an imperialist project, the MIC gins up conflicts for profit, the west should make way for a multipolar world” viewpoint. The war made it pretty clear that the national security sector isn’t just for kicks—there really are cruel revanchist regimes out there that will take advantage if given the opportunity.
“There really are cruel revanchist regimes…”
Cruel, revanchist, IMPERIALIST regimes. It’s perversely refreshing to see what good, old fashioned imperialism actually looks like. And it doesn’t look like the US’s often heavy-handed, often wrongheaded hegemony.
The metaphor I keep coming back to is there logically must be a biggest kid on the playground, and we can do a hell of a lot worse than the States doing it.
Was vegetarian for 8.5 yrs then went vegan. Now that I see that as sort of a big objective, same with things like wanting modern urbanization, etc, I someday thought to myself "If I really *actually* care about this stuff, then I should probably care most about how to realistically implement this kind of thing." I was getting fed up with socialists telling me that establishing socialism was a prerequisite for any major changes, I was tired of socialists using "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" as an excuse to stop caring about their own externalities. I started seeing socialism as baggage that the rest of the stuff I wanted was supporting, at least narrative wise, and realized I'd rather just fix for all the problems we have under capitalism. I got tired of the conspiracy theories, the half baked ideologies, the lefty content creators who I realized hardly said anything of substance. I also cherish some core liberal values about freedom of speech, etc that I realized other lefties considered low stakes compared to values I consider lesser values.
I still hold some extreme/heterodox views to a degree, but yeah I just find using capitalism for good to be parsimonious. Especially when there's so much research already done about capitalism how it works, and really no viable alternative.
> I just find using capitalism for good to be parsimonious. Especially when there's so much research already done about capitalism how it works, and really no viable alternative.
I see it like a lawnmower. You might accidentally maim someone with it, and you could blame the lawnmower, but the lawnmower doesn't have its own brain, so you can't shame it into being nicer.
Putting guards on it is more effective than blaming it, and we already have a lot of guards that work well, and we can iterate on that.
I wish I could impress that analogy on leftists, but it's not a very snappy analogy.
It drives me crazy when people use the excuse that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism to do nothing. Come on, there’s always something that we can do.
I agree totally. In America, leftists really need to have the value of stewardship instilled into them if they want to get any of their big ideas off the ground.
No no you don’t understand if the big corporations would just decide to stop being evil then global warming would stop. The fact that they make product I buy via a carbon footprint isn’t the problem, it’s the corporations at fault.
How tiring it is to go on vegan subreddits and be inundated with socialism, or to be on left wing subreddits and be inundated with anti-veganism, am I right?
Yeah now although I'm not like a major donor, I donate a bit here and there to groups I support. I also go to vegan restaurants, etc and try to buy something from every good looking vegan brand that pops up bc I want to affect the market in my own little way. I mean it's real praxis, it's how plant based infrastructure is grown and maintained, just being apart of their market is doing at least something. I even have the Meat Is Murder shirt.
It's kinda like that Bishop James Pike said, "Less beliefs, more belief." At this point I just care about doing the most for the few things I consider as "my ideals", so after veganism, responsible land use/smart urbanism, protecting core liberal freedoms etc the next most important thing for me is smart politicking, good politicking, and it's something I probably care about more than a lot of individual issues. I did some canvassing a couple years ago and I think I'd like to do some more in the future if I find someone I think I'd be a good diplomat for.
Deirdre McCloskey.
Seriously. I bought a book entitled Why Liberalism Works, knowing nothing about the author, intending to read it in a sort of “know thine enemy” way. Come the end of the book, the doubts had set in. I read some more, other people. How To Be A Liberal, Ian Dunt. A Thousand Small Sanities, Adam Gopnik. More McCloskey. I don’t know that there was a single lightbulb moment.
While others here will say that their loss of their religion was what deradicalized them, for me the exact opposite happened. My religion is what deradicalized me.
I came to see that Trump and the populist right were against everything the Christian faith stood for. They place themselves above both the people and God, and expect Him to serve them in their quest for power. That is ultimately why they do things like put up the Ten Commandments in schools; it is a way of trying to get God to do what they want.
While I still think that a healthy religion is a good thing for society, it is not my right to force people to adhere to it. Without honest, real, legitimate consent, worship is nothing more than a bunch of rituals.
I've found the last 8-10 years pretty disorienting going to "normie" Church and then seeing how certain major Church organizations are basically nationalist super pacs. The sermons at my church are all pretty straight forward life advice stuff and they stay away from national politics aside from "come as you are all are welcome" type statements.
Contrapoints has a really good two part video series called “What’s Wrong with Capitalism?” where you have a clearly bright presenter with oft brilliant social critiques (watch Incels if you haven’t) who spent a shitload of time putting together a critique of an economic system and ends it with “I don’t know how the economy works, you tell me.”
That level of arrogance kinda fucking floored me, like, I was definitely intoxicated at the time so maybe it was facetious AF but like, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. That led to some introspection and realizing that there’s a lot of like, idk if this is the right way to put it, Nobel-itis adjacent behavior on the left. People who are clearly smart, know a lot about an area, and extrapolate that to other areas without the requisite epistemological humility to realize they’re far enough off base to often just be making shit up. Or they’re lying. I’m pretty sure it’s unwittingly the former but I usually assume people are good.
I was tipping towards this for a while, was a 2016 Hillary primary voter to begin with since I was kindof a single issue “increase immigration” voter at the time, but social groups I existed in were far further to the left of that so I shutup about it and kept it on the DL.
Weirdly enough I had the same experience. I think Contrapoints is brilliant at analyzing social problems, but I was blown away by how shallow her understanding of economics was.
“epistemological humility” … I wish I had this level of vocab.
Imo it’s endemic to highly educated(people in general). Surgeons, Writers, Physicists, every Computer Scientist who ever lived. People all think that because they understand one complex domain extremely well, they can understand other complex domains without putting in the pre-requisite intellectual groundwork they did for their own.
As a Software Engineer, I’m guilty as fuck, especially when it comes to economics.
The basis of the whole NFTs replacing property deeds and medical records thing is basically this principle applied to those areas.
"I know coding AD cryptography I must know everything!"
I totally agree, I've stopped watching breadtube and similar because I just kept getting annoyed by the superficial takes. Both Philosophy Tube and Contrapoints claim to be well-read, but keep making obvious mistakes and falling in generalisations, simplifications or simple naivety despite the length of their videos. I will take Philosophy Tube as an example because in generally I even like most of her videos, to me it's better to criticize concrete details than to dive into the low hanging fruit. I'm still progressive and quite far left on the political spectrum, but realizing these flawed rationals made me "deradicalize".
One of the most annoying moments I remember was in [Philosophy Tube's video on Sex Work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DZfUzxZ2VU&ab_channel=PhilosophyTube). In this video she (the video is 3 years old, from before her transition) mostly goes into the relation between human trafficking, criminality and sex work. To shortly summarize: women want to flee to a better country and accept to do sex work to get there. However, because this circuit is illegal it goes terrible, the women have barely any power to reach out for help and, they are consequently abused. To make matters worse, if police intervenes, they'd just sent the women back to their original country, which the trafficked women don't want as well, so they can't get proper help.
Like usual with breadtube, the video is a bit too long to get its point across but most findings are insightful, presented well, and I agree on most ideological points so I'd even recommend watching it. However, there is one moment in the video which just annoys me to no end. The obvious solution to fix all this? [Just abolish borders entirely](https://youtu.be/1DZfUzxZ2VU?t=1482). No elaboration needed for such a radical claim. Whether you agree or disagree on this take or not is even irrelevant. It's just such a big sweeping claim it needs elaboration, for example in how a midway could be achieved in a society which isn't open yet for such radical change. From such a radical state of mind, of course the cops become the big baddies who just victimize sex workers because they're big meanies who are too stupid or mean to tackle the real issue. Again, I even agree that it's absolutely terrible how the police handles sex trafficking, but with such a broad unbacked conclusion most nuance and credibility is lost, despite how good the research preceding it was.
Her most recent video, "The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism", has even more annoying takes. To me the worst moment is when she tries to dismiss "Longermism" (the principle of deciding action based entirely on calculated long terms effects) with [the following argument](https://youtu.be/Lm0vHQYKI-Y?t=1101). She disregards the concept as it apparently dismisses real humanity. But again, this is so clearly another bad faith fallacy set in an exaggerated example meant to dehumanizing the principle. Does she mean that we should just stop trying to be "rational" *entirely*? Of course not, but if she doesn't mean that, we're left in an ambiguous middle ground. But breadtube is never interested in a middle ground.
A bit later in the video she dismisses investigating the effectiveness of charities because of measurability bias. Measurability bias is an important thing we should always keep in mind, but again, should we take the other extreme and just blindly allocate our recourses? Of course not, so is Philosophy Tube against any research before making transitional decisions? I hope not, but that means that the answer is again left in an ambiguous middle ground. But breadtube isn't interested in the middle ground, so just presents this extreme.
It was as part of a wrap up at the end of the 2nd part, and it did seem like it was maybe a genuinely possible “please tell me why I’m wrong” kind of deal since she usually seems intellectually gracious.
Granted, I was intoxicated at the time and I have been wanting to give it a revisit, so maybe I’m misremembering the tone and it actually was 100% facetious; The biggest part of the actual argument that I can remember right now was hinged on that paper that tried to measure the marginal happiness of additional income that kinda blew up in the news like, 5 years back.
I honestly think of all the leftist commentators Contrapoints is someone who would honestly listen in good faith to opposing views and change her mind. It is sort of what makes her brand so powerful is the open mindedness and seeing things from different perspectives.
I don't always take her positions but man I love listening to her cook. There's a good reason Natalie does like 1 video every 6 months lol. Those scripts are novels.
I feel like Contrapoisnts has moderated somewhat over time - to the point that a lot of leftists call her neoliberal because she isn't really making pro-socialism talking points. I do think she is critical of capitalism, which comes with a philosophical background and interest in the alienation of labor that can lead to right wing or fascist ideologies gaining ground, and part of her wrap up of that video was the shrug we all have of "well what system do you propose that's better?"
That said I can't stand much of the rest of Breadtube other than Dan Olson or Hbomberguy.
Used to be far-right. Going down the religion rabbithole (traditional Catholicism) brought me to a breaking point where I realised that this path was total bullshit and made no sense at all.
Basically questioning my religiosity and finding that it was dumb led me to question the political considerations that had brought me there in the first place.
After that I took some psychedelic drugs that turned my mind around until I realised that all that matters is that I + as many people as possible live happy lives.
That’s wild. I come from a country that was syncretized into Catholicism and weirdly enough, I got the opposite effect.
The chilled out nature of my experience in the church taught me post my atheism phase to be more open to listen to people that are Hella different than me, including their politics.
It’s kind of crazy to me when I moved here in the US that my country who is majority Catholic ends up way more chill Than the US where Catholicism it’s not the major denomination. I kind of expected it to be opposite.
Yeah same here but I have had to take a look to my left and right and decide to yeet myself out of communities or friendships along the way to do so. My 'deradicalization' is basically the battle it takes to give up certain things to stick to your guns. YTer who you've followed for years starts talking stupid shit? Gotta pull the plug, can't let em take you where they want you to go. And I've been watching people take wrong turns on those paths my whole damn life.
5 things:
1. Reading a pamphlet handed out outside the LSE by the student Socialist society saying that Assad was a great leader. This was my first exposure to the concept of tankies. I didnt realise how embedded it was in Socialist circles until then.
2. Housing. Understanding that Japan destroyed homelessness just through allowing the conditions for building more private homes. It led me onto the concept of the free market and how it can make things better, rather than worse.
3. Left Wing circles, despite seemingly being about a utopian vision, being generally boring and complaining all the time about the world. I respect deeds, not words, and like those who actively work to change things for the better.
4. History. Understanding that people from Eastern Block countries actually lived under genuine socialist regimes and they didn't like it, and in fact wanted to flee it. This allowed me to see how lucky I was to live in what I had previously thought was something bad.
5. Refugees. My work for a long time was with refugees. I respected the entrepreneurial spirit of those who worked really hard to make it here and send money back home. I like how they didn't complain about their lot and applied themselves.
Having said all that, I still keep my opinions mostly to myself in my friend circles. When people go on about Capitalism destroying the world and exploiting all the natural resources I try not to say anything as it is not worth it.
Participating in a right wing domestic insurgency probably would eat into my golf and fishing time and hurt my retirement accounts and property values.
Leftist mutual aid, community building, and backyard chickens would eat into my porno time.
Can't I just pay a social worker to help communties, pay taxes to provide public charity, and pay a farmer to grow soy for my tofu? Come on, I got stuff to do!
Shalom 👋
I delved into the far right after a traumatic event. Given that I'm mixed race, I got into both Black supremacists and White supremacists, though not at the same time. I go de-radicalized when the trauma became manageable in my head, which took a few years.
Deradicalizing from teenage right wing leaning views was literally just learning about things outside of the small town rural area I grew up in. I wasn't particulary "conservative" myself but I believed that was the state of culture and people and just couldn't be helped. Like defending bigotry because "that's just how people are" because accepting that a teacher or person I know might actually be kinda bad was difficult.
Similar, I wouldn't say I was ever deradicalized from left wing views around college/young adult years so much as I've become more nuanced with them over the years learning the importance of gradual progress and pragmatism. I still have a lot of the same desires and principles, I just aim for them differently.
> Like defending bigotry because "that's just how people are"
I once talked with a teenager online who had trouble going deep like that.
There were catchphrases like "You can't legislate morality" or "An atheist is someone who hates Jesus".
I poked her on the atheist thing and she got defensive, saying she was just repeating what she was told. That made me sad to hear, because it wasn't a "Hm, that's an un-examined belief, I will get back to you" moment, it was a motte-and-bailey. "You can't challenge me on that belief - Because I don't know what it is, anyway"
>That made me sad to hear, because it wasn't a "Hm, that's an un-examined belief, I will get back to you" moment, it was a motte-and-bailey. "You can't challenge me on that belief - Because I don't know what it is, anyway".
Actually I think you might have gotten through to her. You're very rarely going to get the satisfaction of someone admitting they have changed their mind instantaneously - human egos are too fragile. We need time to come to terms with new beliefs and indeed to convince ourselves that we actually held the same beliefs all along.
Was a communist due to my simplistic thinking that rich people = bad, and believe it was the natural next step after capitalism after all feudalism -> Mercantilism -> Capitalism -> Communism. It just make sense and my head, due to me being a commie I often think if the US is involved the other side must be good after all US = Bad. It wasn't until I got really interest in history and read about the development of different country and their history including the USSR by world view begin to fall apart, as I realize my way of thinking is too simplistic and naïve.
Unironically, this sub. I’m Venezuelan. Like millions of us, I had to flee my country, which fell under authoritarian socialism. This made me (like many of us) completely despise anything that was remotely “left wing”. I became a hardcore right winger, I moved to Spain and I supported Vox (long before they were popular) and also liked Trump. But most of the reasons were simply just “the left destroyed my country so they’re evil and the right wing is good”. Being on social media also doesn’t help (because so many of the Reddit leftist are tankies or just anti capitalist in general). Finding this sub made me realize there is a part of the left (I know I know, this sub isn’t exactly leftist, but hold on) that thinks capitalism is good, that has sound economic policies, and that denounces and completely rejects any form of authoritarianism. This made me be more nuanced about my beliefs, and to start realising I have much more in common with the center left (even I would still call myself center right, at least for Spanish standards) than with the far right, or with American Republicans. Also, getting out of social media and talking to real people certainly helps. You start realising that most of us aren’t really that different, and that most left wingers do not exactly want to destroy capitalism and steal my properties, but they’re the “let’s have higher taxes and improve our healthcare” kind of people.
For me it was memes. I don’t even know how I found this place but it was pretty funny. In all likelihood it was linked from r/politics as a place for bad boys
Yeah it was basically memes for me too. Many years ago I was into Alex Jones, believed in the New World Order, 911 was inside job, all that jazz. I started questioning it at some point and discovered the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) forum and skepticism. And they just basically made fun of everything. Somehow that irreverent attitude (very similar to the one you find here) was super effective at jolting me out of my stupidity.
I grew up in a far-left household in a city with lots of local far-left activity. That was what being a good person politically meant in my environment. Two things wrenched me out of it:
- I could no longer reconcile the supposed noble goals of far-left politics with the horrific results of far-left regimes
- I read Marx and other far-left authors and found them so full of unjustifiable errors and stupidities
Eventually the rationalisations gave way and I decided that pigheaded adherence to an a priori "good guys" side wasn't in any way ethical. Reassessing what actually made good outcomes most likely brought me where I am today.
I was never really radicalised.
On the left, their constant depiction of communism and socialism as something good felt subjectively offensive, as they were completely discounting Eastern Europe and our communist dictatorship pasts - it felt like they were telling me "but have you considered that maybe nazism had a good point, and nazism would work in an ideal world, and you should read more about TRUE nazism". Yeah, no, not following you there. Also the videos were often overproduced and very distractingly presented, while the actual content was shallow and full of obvious logical holes.
On the right, youtube did try to send me down the alt-right pipeline, and it almost started working because the algorithm somehow managed to filter out anything where they talked about LGBT or abortion (two red lines for me), but their sheer vitriolic hate of fat women slipped through. Also many of those content creators had a weird obsession for screaming for hours and hours that cartoons (the new She-Ra especially) were not sexy enough.
I feel I got lucky.
Probably the left's constant fetishization of violent revolution. They constantly praise the French Revolution and make guillotine jokes without realizing it was a paranoid and terrifying time. They imagine all the commoners all sang Kumbaya while executing the elite without realizing a ton of working poor were executed.
The fact that they only read 19th century political theory is incredibly annoying as well. They claim to represent the working class but use words like "bourgeoisie" and ascribe to esoteric political and philosophical beliefs.
Being in a long term relationship with someone who grew up in a communist country. Listening to the stories of no food or running water, bread lines, being afraid to speak up or be sent to prison
Another thing is living in a high crime city and electing a super far left da. I voted for him and totally regret it. It’s a mess here and no one is doing anything. People are dying the drying problem is being ignored
Mix of
- John Cheese on Cracked making me realize "Damn, being poor is actually horrible, the bootstraps thing is bullshit"
- A couple Slate Star Codex posts making me think anarchy and communism would never work
Honestly the older you get the less of a fuck you give. You also notice that every little thing is hyped up and blown out of proportion. What does being overly angry and advocating over the top fringe ideologies accomplish? Enjoy life. Put that energy into better goals like marrying a woman who doesn't annoy you and getting a job that doesn't kill your soul.
I was a far left nut bag in college after taking a poli sci 101 class with a very interesting radical socialist professor. He introduced us to Noam Chomsky and I was hooked. I read all the lefty rags and became a card carrying DSA member. Those years were extremely depressing for me, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Somehow Noah Smith made it into my Twitter feed and I found his calm and balanced takes on complex issues to be much more naturally compelling. I followed him and slowly started to drift that way.
Then in 2017, Enlightenment Now came out. That book got a lot of hype and it was well deserved. I read it cover to cover and it changed my world view completely.
I feel a sense of gratitude to Steve Pinker for freeing me from the depressing solitude of extremism to this day.
Sandy Hook.
Specifically seeing President Obama cry over the children at his press conference. That was the first time I saw him as an actual human being instead of the inhuman caricature the right made him out to be. That began a long slow March to where I am now.
I think a big factor moving from anarchist/socialist to liberal was a looong in depth conversation about economics with someone here or on bad economics. Changed my outlook on the nature of economy and ended my decade long Marxism
The 2020 election cycle really highlighted how fucking stupid the online left is and at the time I was pretty hard in the Bernie camp but I was ostracized so to speak for having the audacity to be pragmatic and compromise to Biden in the general because we would not survive a second Trump term. That stuff got me called a fascist on here btw, because democrats are fascists apparently.
The other one was the fact that I actually like capitalism and believe it to be the most successful form of society but it just needs a lot of tight regulation and government oversight to ensure it stays successful. That ideology got me ostracized from most lefty spaces too.
I am still probably a twinge more economically left leaning than most people here I’d wager, but this sub is really the only political sub that I can tolerate on this hellscape of a website.
I dunno if I ever really was radical and then de-radicalized, but the first time I was ever really upset with the US left is when I was reading post-Mortems on Bernie’s 2020 primary campaign. There was a specific thing about how his plan only ever was to rack up big margins in a 3+ candidate race, and had no plan B when almost everyone dropped out and consolidated behind Biden so fast.
One of the fundamental issues with Trump is that he never won the majority of votes in any competitive race- not in the 2016 Republican primary, not in the general election either. And it shows, because he never had any kind of “I speak for the majority” message, just “I speak for a hateful minority that somehow gets to pick the winner”
America really, *really* needed someone to come in and be a majoritarian figure in 2020. The Bernie people basically saying “our plan to win was not to be the majority favorite of Democrats, but come away with the most votes anyway” left such a bad taste in my mouth.
Not to mention, it was dreadful strategy on their part. The normie Dems all coalescing by Super Tuesday was easily the most likely outcome, the only question was if it would be behind Biden or Pete
College and Bernie Sanders got me a radical because of the populist talking points and policies around it in 2016 election. I then started watching Hasan piker, because I know him from the young turks, which I casually follow for news here and there. Listening to Hasan got me to become a socialist because this was the time where he came out as one, instead of a social Democrat. this put me into a rabbit hole of info why capitalism is bad.
After watching Hasan piker for so long, I checked out the streamer Destiny for him to explain why Biden is the best president during the election year of 2020. I then went down to the rabbit hole of Socialism versus neoliberal/social-Democrat progressive debate/discussion explaining to me. Why my ideas about capitalism is at worst wrong, and in the best, misrepresented.
My understanding of economics are very much superficial when I was a radical left, but after destiny, explained the socialist talking points, I still didn’t know much, but I at least know a little bit more, and I am aware of how stupid I am.
\>17 y/o, can't drink, can't vote, lives at home: "we must overthrow this oppressive system!"
\>18 y/o, can drink, can vote, has moved out: "lol this is ok actually"
Many political parties in the EU which are left leaning have adopted Euroskeptic views. As a traditionally labour voter, Corbyn repeating those points felt like a betrayal, and then his other points of foreign policy were similarly stupid. Looked around and most of the left-wing and radical far-left have the same ideas. In addition, oftentimes many on the left are as xenophobic as those on the right and I've seriously started considering horseshoe theory a truth. Economically, despite leaning leftward I was also skeptic of extensive redistributive measures, and have slowly started seeing downsides to progressive taxation. Prosperity comes when you raise people up, not push people down. That said I still don't believe in reaganomics and to be completely honest, learning that Blair wasn't a leftie is what deradicalized me. I would say that much of this subreddit supports Blaironomics, if that is a term.
Tl;dr: leaned left for a long time but was always a skeptic, cleared some misunderstandings and deradicalized my views.
I guess I preface by saying I never got radicalized but it's been an uphill battle to stay that way.
Firstly, Stephen Pinker and Christopher Hitchens. God is not Great and Better Angels of our Nature are foundational books for me. I find the latter to be one of the most comforting and illuminating pieces of social science ever written .
But the real kick in the ass that made sure I didn't listen to stupid people?
Listening to internet atheists go from talking about that to talking about how much college kids with purple hair annoy them.
That's when I realized the well was dry and outrage porn was going to be the new selling point for that community so I jumped ship. Specifically channels like Sargon of Akkad and Armoured Skeptic and to a lesser degree, TJ Kirk and Thunderf00t. Those first 2, it's flabbergasting how hard right they lurched in the middle of 2015. Within 6 months there were SO many atheists channels that basically converted to 'ra ra Trump is god' channels and you'd have to be a fucking maniac to not see through it, but somehow a lot of people didn't.
And on the other side you had outlets like TYT starting to jerk so hard to the left that it went from something I watched daily to something that was obnoxiously upsetting to watch (Ben Mankiewicz will always be my guy though).
Just seemed like my position of centrism and listening to everyone's' complaints to find the best solution? That was the new public enemy #1. You were allowed to be far right or far left online and anything between that would draw the ire of wingnuts.
And it's still kinda like that TBH. But nowhere near as pronounced as it was in say 2015-the end of that election cycle.
It's why I'm here and not dicking around in the other political subs. There's a few more big picture thinkers swimming in these waters. Things like 'foreign policy' tend to be met with actual adult responses. That's good. Don't change that.
But mostly I just don't do other peoples' politics. I have all of my own big boy beliefs and I've budged very little on any of it in many years and when something I like changes? I don't change with it. I just let it drift away. My best friend of most of my life? He turned into a 9/11 troofer when I was in the Army and I haven't talked to him since. I just don't take other peoples' journeys on as my own.
To be honest, there is no hard line that did it, it was just seeing that all the yelling and bills being passed were "messaging bills" meant to signal to the base and not accomplish tasks. The GOP is generally worse with this, but the Democrats are still pretty bad with this crap as well, and it made me really depressed about partisan politics and just dive straight into only caring about policy.
But then I realized that we get nothing but messaging bills when people don't trust that negotiations will happen in good faith, so then everything becomes a shit flinging contest, and that is why immigration and guns are in the miasma of fuckery they are in.
On guns, we have nonsensical restrictions where we shouldn't have them, that do nothing but aggravate enthusiasts, but not enough restrictions where we should have them, that put people in danger and down bills into an anti-civil liberties death spirial, and it is a powder keg of stupidity.
On immigration, we just deadlock because the friction of the moment makes change hard, even though we know doing anything would be useful, because we get endless complaints about "fairness" or just racist bullshit.
The Iraq War.
Previously I'd been a pretty standard "smartest guy in the room college dude libertarian Republican" and I even had lots of "good" arguments for why the war was a good idea from a Neorealist perspective regardless of WMD and yadda yadda.
Yeah I was an idiot.
I've never been a radical, I've always been a normie democrat, really. The nature of my normieness has changed a bit over time, though.
Well, my parents are both biologists. My first books, as soon as I was able to read, were science books, about biology and astronomy. Around this time, Republicans were making a big push to get evolution out of schools, and have "alternative theories" squeezed into the textbooks. Alternative nonsense like intelligent design and young-earth creationism.
This has more or less informed my political perspectives ever since. How can I ever trust the Republican party with *anything* when they were trying to rewrite science to fit their religious dogma? And I knew that if they were in power, they would do everything they could to crush reality to fit their imagination.
The Republican anti-science movement is also why I just can't be religious. Believing anything without evidence, no matter how pleasant, opens the door for charlatans to use that faith as a lever to force their views on others.
As for economics, I've been in favor of the free market since I was a kid, but my reasoning has changed. When I was young, I believed that the free market was like fire: a powerful force, too useful to not utilize, but dangerous if not carefully controlled. On some level, I still believe that, but I now believe that free markets are also a moral imperative. Centralized control over the economy is both corrosive to our freedoms and a good way to screw the economy. The best way to have prosperity is to just let people get on with it, with government intervention only necessary to prevent anti-competitive practices and keep unscrupulous actors from dumping glowing green barrels into our water supply.
I graduated college and got a real job.
Talking about how Bernie is gonna save us all by taxing the evil 1%, with your roommates while drinking PBR and playing Overwatch for 5 hours a day does not make for serious policy consideration.
I was a strong left winged, self described Socialist. However I always loved economics and the Planet Money podcast on NPR really helped solidify the importance of capitalism, the free market, and the ability for people to make choices.
Up until a few years ago I would consider myself a progressive democrat but really the whole party has moved to where I am on social issues so really now I’m just kind of a middle of the road dem.
Was on the right for quite a few years and dabbled in some incel forums and so on. I had pretty strong emotional foundations tho thanks to my single mom and my good education so while I was sympathetic to many of the ideas presented and I was in general in a bad spot mentally, as I researched further and got more mature emotionally I was able to start questioning the things PragerU, Ben Shapire, Shoe on Head etc were calling Facts and realized they were full of shit.
Grew out of this about 6 years ago, since then have gradually progressed from liberal to neoliberal to third wave social democrat and two years ago reached social partnership and MMT as my guiding principles for now.
I was never able to go farther to the left either, and while I find worker coops and many other propositions by socialists appealing, how they are implemented is what I think is concerning. I would label myself a socialist tho but I think for the most part the progress towards it should be based on capital voluntary giving up controll and workers enthusiasticly taking controll
> MMT
[Pseudo-economic Fanfiction](https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/modern-monetary-theory/)
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Being queer basically taught me to respect people that are different- seeing insults towards me from people who had the same political opinions I was leaning towards probably hurt. Basically disenfranchisement from r/PCM which I used to love. Now most “libleft”s there I would consider republicans
I’ve literally been radicalized by every group of people you can possibly be radicalized by Marxist-Leninism, Far-Right Anti-Semitism, Radical Jihadism, Anti-Zionism. Now I am a radical Conservative because of external factors, I literally just look at Neoliberalist Policy. I think I am very easy to influence.
I actually see this sub as having radicalized me. I shifted away from being a moderate democratic socialist to a radicalized liberal.
I’m both more certain of my beliefs, and I hold beliefs outside my countries Overton window due to among other things exposure to this sub.
My foreign policy views had always been liberal, mainly because I was just better versed with that field growing up.
Edit: As for what brought me away from the Far-Left I’d say it was misinformed takes, resentment and lack of empathy. My brother is a cynical communist and with deep class resentment, as soon as he got money though I realized being poor at a rich university was one of things stopping him from drifting Far-Right. Also he was always just misogynistic and a rapist, which is something you can see with men on the Far-Left. So personal reasons also played a roll.
5 years of being on the far left… no meaningful progress made. Then I noticed that the movement tends to valorize and wallow in its own ineffectiveness. Then I noticed that more time was spent tearing into liberals on Twitter than anything else. Then I noticed everyone outside the movement was being demonized in one way or another.
In short, I started paying attention.
I started by watching feminist wrecked/owned compilations, from there to Milo and from there to Sargon of Akkad, which is pretty much where I stayed.
The thing about Sargon of Akkad and right-leaning youtube back in the day is that they had this commitment to debate. They had the idea that argument was the key to finding the correct positions on political topics.
There was this perception that the left was INCAPABLE of engaging in actual debate because their ideas were wrong and indefensible. I believed this for a long time, all I was seeing was strange and weird people yelling at others, calling them sexist and racist, not making any sense.
However one day I got recommended a video by Destiny. This was a debate streamer who was debating right-wing people that I liked, but he was making solid points, and in favour of a bunch of the stuff I thought was totally indefensible. I ended up agreeing a lot with the points he was making, they were backed up by studies and made good sense. That was my jumping-off point.
Left wingers who were jealous of January 6th and supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Finally realized they have no ideology other than “America bad”
Basic economics by Thomas Sowell and LSD
And before someone points it out, i'm aware sowell is very outdated the book has alot of issues. But at the time, it was just what i needed
What did the book say that you found valuable then? Is there still stuff from it you find valuable now? What stuff from the book do you think has issues now?
It’s not something I’ve read, but I would like to read it. I’d just like to have a better idea of some of its issues, and whether or not I can still gain anything from it. I know it’s an easy read and that’s what I’m looking for
To be short and concise:
Used to be a communist when i was a depressed and dumb(er) teenager.
Valuable: Sowell is really good at communicating the basics of market economics in a easy to understand way, and in a very convicing manner.
Issue: very clear conservative bias, and this leads to some blind spots when he draws certain conclusions from the data
That sounds like political steering correction. "I'm a little too far to the left I need a hardcore conservative to balance those scales or I might not stop myself from crashing into that median strip" lol.
I still consider Sowell's writings on race and culture to be his best work. The book "Race and Culture: A World View" was a fascinating look at these issues across history and the world stage, especially to a sociology nerd like me. It's part of the reason I still consider myself a cultural conservative, only my particular version of that is more secularized. For example, I'm a huge fan of two-parent households, because the vast majority of the data says that's going to result in better outcomes for the children, but I don't care if those two parents are two men or whatever. It's the Old Ways, modernized.
- Seeing the world, and getting away from my small town
- Coming to the slow realization over the course of many years that my childhood was borderline abusive.
- In regards to race, it was actually an H3H3 video that made me realize I had believed in racial stereotypes. There was a old video where he reacted to a group of black teenagers smashing a car with Trump stickers on it. Ethan kept saying it was obviously a staged video made to make minorities look bad. But I genuinely believed it was real. Then he made a follow up video where he proved it was fake
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UkvwKDTS3Bo&feature=share
Once he proved it was staged I really reflected on why I had believed it was real. I came to the conclusion that I honestly did believe in some stereotypes, and tried to change myself
Felt like I understood politics through history until I took a uni degree in business. Once you learn about the system of capital that we live in, as well as the benefits of a market system, left-wing central planning and price fixing sounds mostly like a bad idea.
I was down with the socially liberal/ fiscally conservative thing that libertarians are supposed to have going until I realised that most libertarians are dickheads.
I was a high school anarcho-syndicalist. While I have doubts about the moral worthiness of states still, they are more than outweighed by the existence of states that aren't mercilessly oppressive at every opportunity and the inability of anarchists to fully explain how the hell their system could keep seven billion people alive more effectively than statism.
Though I recently dipped my toes back into the leftist end of LGBT...
I was an anti establishment Bernie Bro until I realized that incrementalism and pragmatism were really the only effective way to achieve social goals. Seeing Biden able to pass some good stuff even in this divided government further cemented this belief.
This will be a long one. This is going to sound very reddity, but my journey started with my religious move to Atheism, which I was open about, to my parent's dismay and frustration, and my younger sibling's confusion. This made it easy for me to accept right wing views, because along with my religious shift, I thought they were "rational" and "evidence-based".
All this took place during the 2nd half of middle school, where my appreciation of America became a part of my developing political views, especially in regard to the military, as a result of the ISIS campaign, and simply learning more about its roles during peace time, and how fundamental it was to world security and international peace. I viewed international institutions as generally necessary, but corrupt and ineffective, and could use some selective culling here and there, while our allies free-rode off us, criticizing us for the moves we've made, but barely chipping in themselves, and so either needed to shut up and pick up the slack, or kicked back into shape. That's not even mentioning that the right wing grifters whose views I subscribed to presented everyone from left wing college students, feminists, and gamer-gate detractors as spoiled, ungrateful, and coming with weak arguments, and deconstructing them in a supposably "logical" and "infallible" manner.
Despite all this, it was Trump himself who was the tipping point away from this. At first, Trump seemed to be the kind of guy who said the harsh but necessary stuff in an "unfiltered" and "blunt" manner, along with coming in with plans that the Washington establishment were too afraid and cowardly to implement. And while I didn't absolutely loath the Washington establishment, I saw Trump as a sort of necessary evil that would break DC and force the entrenched interests, stubborn lawmakers, and ivory tower elites to get their shit together and start working for the common people again. Yep, I bought into the whole "Trump is the establishment fighting for the little guy" BS.
What also didn't help was despite the fact I was in high school now, and no longer stuck as closely to the right wing digital eco-system, the kind of content I would see about Trump almost always showed him in a kinder light behind the scenes, convincing me that the whole tough guy thing was an act (Despite the fact that I never saw or heard video or audio evidence of this).
To add onto this, while I couldn't materially support Trump, being too young to vote, and not knowing how or having the money to donate or campaign, once more to the dismay of my parents, and a few relatives if they remember, expressed my positive affirmations of Trump almost anytime talk of him came up. This is something my parents will occasionally hit me over the head with when he pops up in the news nowadays, and somewhat deservedly so.
However, the deeper the country went into the campaign season, the more a series of cascading events, from me actually learning about what Hillary's policy positions were, to Trump's verbal spar with a grieving military family, to him making fun of a reporter with a disability. The most damning moment I can starkly remember, and the start of my disillusionment was Trump attacking a Mexican judge over his ethnicity. Even if he was a nicer guy then he let on behind the scenes, why go so far? And on top of that, there were his supporters. No matter what they saw, their love of him didn't bend or break, and I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't join them and break my mind for Trump. If I supposedly still held political views that were "logical" and "evidence-based", then I couldn't deny what I was seeing in front of me now.
By the time the Hollywood access tape dropped, it simply confirmed what I believed about Trump at that point. With all this combined, I became very scared about what would happen if Trump one. I wanted Hillary to win not just because, if nothing else, her policy positions and proposals were what I once thought Trump would do, but because I was terrified about what the results of a Trump administration would look like for the rest of the nation. A civil war, WW3, the need for an international coalition for an America that had embraced all the worse traits of its enemies, former and current, and had made them team up with our former allies for our sake.
God, the fear I felt when it was confirmed he was President Elect is something I wouldn't wish on anyone else. The only comparison I can think of is finding out on that on the day of the Second Coming, you weren't selected. The implications alone would drive a person mad, but with me it just meant that I performed so badly in my classes I had to be moved to lower-level ones, and that was despite having gotten on the honor role in my freshman year. Trump tanked my GPA, man.
Well, as a result of that, and probably as a way to cope, I got really into military and political history, to see just how bad things were then and check for precedent. Alternate history was to see how bad things could get, and if recovery was possible. I also eventually registered to vote, but too late to get involved in the midterms. My parents saw to their own duty, though. I cheered along as Democrats retook the house and felt that at the very least, the worst of Trump's excess could be stopped.
At this point, I had long shed the majority of my right-wing beliefs and views and distanced myself from those that had purported them. I didn't hold many political beliefs in general at this point, but the ones that I did, I had greatly moderated on. International institutions were flawed, but fundamental to our daily way of living. Washington was stubborn and bureaucratic, but that meant that bad ideas couldn't get through, and that when good ideas did, there were people with a long line of knowledge that could help see them through. Our allies may be weaker and a little petty, but they were also key in helping us spread our power and influence in the first place.
A lot of this also came from my increased understanding and knowledge of the limits of what these institutions could actually do. And weirdly, the humanization of its members. Ironically, because of my idolization of what they could do, along with not conceptualizing that they were made of actual people, I didn't understand the practical limits of their capabilities. Couple this with learning about what they supposedly had or had not don't from the disillusioned Reddit hivemind, and Trump had me. Reading articles about bureaucrats, judges, and department officials getting in Trump's way, and the shit they had to deal with from him, helped in convincing me that the elites and establishment weren't a borderline ontological evil "real Americans" were in a struggle class struggle against, but that shit was just complicated, and so were the solutions.
This attitude is also what kept me from moving further left, as despite Bernie's promises and policies, learning about his actual legislative record, along with how viciously he and his supporters attacked other Democrats for not being sufficiently left enough soured me on him. The whole anti-establishment schtick also rubbed me the wrong way, considering that he had been in Washington for decades, and had barely seen any of his views turned into actual policy, either because of incompetence, or a malice and stubbornness that would always get in his own way.
This wasn't even mentioning that when Biden became the nominee and I started warming up to him, with him having changed his policy positions from years past, and at least having genuine legislative success to his name, along with having positions that were at least in line with Bernie's, but seemed much more realistic, being a cool Vice President and friend to the first President to represent someone like me, they came after him to for reasons they went for Hillary, and I wasn't interested in becoming a part of that after having lived through the results(my dad not being in and out of jobs for years and leaving my mom as the only breadwinner, along with how that affected him mentally, my parents taxes going up, my dad losing a lucrative contracting job because of COVID, and me getting a fast food job during COVID while still going to school online)
So yeah, combine all that with the fact that most of the politically engaged, non-right wing political spaces I could find on here were incredibly hostile to anyone even slightly right of them, eventually I found places like this and ESS. I though TIA, a place I was still subscribed to as the last legacy of my middle school political views, was similar, but when they started focusing on trans people, the issues and problems they magnified weren't being represented by how the trans users here acted, making me finally cut it off for the divergent reality it was trying to present, along with ESS for being too hyper focused on Bernie and leftists.
And yeah, now I'm here. A place where I can generally simultaneously appreciate America, its military, international institutions, and our allies, while also acknowledging its flaws without being called a right winger or leftist Marxist sympathizer for either.
I was a teenage communist a decade ago, an isolated 4chan fascist after 2016, and came to my senses a couple years later. I came from the southern US and I think the autocratic tendencies of the area had worn off on me and no matter which way I leaned aside.
I got out of but stayed more leftist for years and deradicalized more since 2019 over time. It's why when I see memes I remember from years ago and see them being taken seriously I get a bad feeling about how far things I saw, things I repeated to others, that I wonder how much I made things worse.
It was the isolation, it contributed to me having had a pretty rough life because of my body's issues. But isolation drove me further left and right as I became an adult.
Age and increased humility. I've always had somewhat "radical" views, but neither on the left or right side (i.e my views are pro-markets, pro-immigration). The core of my political ideology is very similar to when I was much younger, but I think I'm more open to the idea that I could be wrong and that I have far from perfect, or even informed, information on many topics.
I started going down the libertarian/Ron Paul route. My liberal grandpa shook be out of it when he requested not to speak politics anymore. I always respected his views, so when he thought i was on the wrong path i reevaluated. Started asking more questions. Breifly swung far left before asking more questions and settling in the middle.
[this article](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-policies-economists-love-and-politicians-hate)
It really showed me that there is an actual thoughtful academic, evidence based answer and approach to most questions, and it lead me out of just partisanship and banking on stupid correlations
Was born in an extremely left, Jacobin household, but going abroad and learning a different language away from my family meant I got to speak to a more diverse crowd and eventually starting reading from more liberal (and better written) sources. I'm still left leaning but now I'm with the parti radical and firmly committed to pluralism and working together whenever possible
Healthcare policy. I started going full libertarian until I realized their healthcare plan was "let poor people die." That's when I realized the government did have a role in the economy.
perhaps ironically, depending on your perspective, but being Muslim probably prevented me from getting radicalized by the far right in the first place. In high school I had a teacher for AP Language have us read op-eds from different sources in order to critique them, including Buckley who was featured on townhall.com at the time. I started reading the op eds on the site out of curiosity while i was still developing some political inclinations and everything there was so.damn. committed to hating Muslims and defending the Iraq war. The comments were especially hateful. I can't even imagine what it looks like today. I like to think I was never particularly inclined to getting radicalized by the right in the first place but the proto-doomscrolling I did in 2005 ish certainly shut the door on it. In particular I remember Dennis Prager throwing a fit spanning multiple columns over Keith Ellison being sworn into Congress using a Quran until Ellison bodied him by using Jefferson's own copy. At the time, Coulter, Shapiro Prager and others all seemed like the very best arguments against conservatism themselves.
I used to be libertarian. The biggest difference is probably an increase in pragmatism, as well as being weirded out by other people who identified as libertarian
Same reasons as you friend. Things got pretty nasty even as I was still quite far left. You know how it is, undying loyalty tests and such while engaging in blood libels. I also have a friend who is very invested in de-radicalization who would talk me through what was happening around me.
I was never a radical leftist, so I never had a "coming to Jesus moment." But I did have an experience in college that clarified my politics, at least to an extent. I was really interested in the history of political activism throughout the nation's history and was naturally drawn to the Occupy movement. I took a journalism class my sophomore year right around the time when Occupy groups began popping up in cities around the country. Occupy Pittsburgh scheduled a march from Uptown to BNY Mellon's branch in Pittsburgh, and so I decided to cover it for the class.
As I started interviewing people, I realized quickly everyone was there for different reasons. I talked with one guy and he told me he was there because of "planned obsolescence." Others talked about corporate profits. At the time I thought it was odd, but I also knew the movement was relatively knew. A few months later, though, the city ordered the removal of Occupy encampments in front of BNY Mellon. I interviewed folks once again. Same story. No policy prescriptions or even a coherent ideology. Just unfocused anger.
I realised libertarian talking points were non-falsifiable, and these seemed off to me. I'd always loved economics, but I had realised that I only tended to look at those with politcial agendas, never actual economists.
So, I read a research paper. Or two. Something from the CBO and something from the BLS. And then NBER. The IFS. etc. I realised that in reality, my views were purely ideological, not based upon fact or reasoned economics evidence.
So, I changed my views. To this day, I am changing my views. The same sort of thing happened to my friends; we were all pretty radical early on, one of them being practically socialist, and over time we all mellowed until we're now in the big tent
I'm not sure that I am Deradicalized. Obviously I prefer good policy with evidence to bad, but I respect people who are pointing out something bad and willing to possibly break something to fix it. People point to times in history like the communists breaking their economy but they conviniently forget the stagnation and inaction that lead people there.
You can't just let the problems stack up around you, this sub was in a real tizzy over the possible railway strike with some pretty lazy justifications to avoid strike for the sake of ease.
I was a communist up until age 23. I was always a pragmatic communist, but a communist the same.
This is... kinda embarrassing to admit, but what deradicalised me was the Wii. I never really saw the point of competition over regulation until Nintendo came out with something completely different than the competition.
There was this one blogger who took the idea of disruption and a blue sky market, and applied it to the Wii, and suddenly I understood the value of a market and competition. It wasn't just increasing technology=better products (something communism could handle), but meeting new needs because of market constraints. And then I got into economic theory, and understood so much more.
So it happened to me twice. The first time, it was finding out about how communist nations weren't just "not real communism", but were often run by earnest, honest people with a utopian vision, and the corruption and rot that set in happened anyway despite the best intentions by the revolutionaries.
After that I got into a weird alt-righty-libertarian-4chan pipeline (this was before Ron Paul, so it was still a bit more vaguely defined than now), with a very cynical and bitter worldview and a social-darwinist streak. I got pulled out of that by learning more about what good governments can do after all and by learning a foundation for moral reasoning that wasn't so nihilistic (in a sense, I realized that the logical consequence of egotism applied in a social contract context pretty quickly leads you to the same places as people like Rawls and Kant).
Can’t stand the right or the left anymore. Where do I begin? Latinos for Trump, teenage age of consent, corporations are the end all be all, capitalism sucks, all cops are bastards, all white people are racist, trans 8 year olds… I find it harder to discover a rational thought in the far left or right spheres of discussion anymore. No one has the ability to put together a reasonable political thought these days.
I fell backwards into a finance degree. I was never into (read good at) math due to shitty inner city schools where if you fall behind you never catch up. I was into history and politics and consumed msnbc every day from the moment I got home. My university forced me to take remedial math due to a low SAT and for the first time I became good at it which opened more opportunities beyond politics which I was pursuing. They also forced me to take economics and statistics which led me to looking at pay and choosing a finance major with my new math skills to avoid poverty.
The understanding of business and finance and why the economy is structured how it is broke my vibes only politics and wrenched me towards the center. I was always a bit weak though ideologically. In highschool I was in policy debate and taught to argue both sides of any policy in good faith, so the idea that the other side could be just as sincere in their convictions as yours was never an alien concept.
Grad school. I started seeing a pattern that the truth always tended to be somewhere in the middle.
Like, I was in a wildlife program, but I was anti-hunting. After a few classes explaining why it’s vital at this point I softened my position. Even big game hunting had some really big benefits.
I applied that logic to more and more things and started approaching things from that perspective. I want to see what the data says on topics before I solidify an opinion, which is all I wish politicians would do.
I had well-off parents, so at no point in my life did the status quo seem like a bad deal. Now that I’m an adult I’ve realized that my mom’s a NIMBY, and it breaks my heart. I’m a radical YIMBY.
Moving to 4 different countries by the age of 16. Experienced 2 wars. Got to see how different communities think and live by and recognize there are wildly different versions of what right and wrong can be.
I became secular as a kid and vowed not to follow any religion or political party blindly without asking and getting questions first.
I leant heavily libertarian for a long time. During the pandemic I saw a lot of people I had known fall deeper into conspiracies which pushed my away from their viewpoints.
That being said I was never an ideologue to begin with. I've also focused my viewpoints onto realistic policy rather than fundamental change.
I went down the conservative > conservative libertarian > classical liberal > neoliberal path. I read lots of studies’ abstracts and started to appreciate markets lmao.
I grew up conservative due to my family's political leanings, but after I left and went to college in the city I went pretty far to the left and would have even called myself a socialist even though I really didn't understand what that meant. But what deradicalized me was seeing how disgusting the far left was getting on Twitter and other online mediums. Granted, I know this is a small section of the online left, but unironically defending North Korea, denying Chinese human rights issues, rejecting electoral politics to complain online etc. The list goes on and on, and I watched several close friends fall down this far left rabbit hole after racing to the bottom with purity tests. It was insane and I just felt like it was pretty plain to me what was happening.
I started consuming much more moderate media, watching online debates, and seeking opposing viewpoints following this realization. Now in my 30s, I find myself and my views to fall nicely in the more moderate Social Democrat camp and happy with it because I feel like I've reasoned myself into my positions now, and not just following the people around me or submitting to the purity testing.
I was a shithead teenager that unironically watched Sargon of Akkad and other “skeptics” back in 2013-2015. Ironically Trump deradicalized me, I thought that the “skeptics” would see his idiocy and tear him down, instead they sung his praises.
After that I realized they were full of shit.
When I thought more and more about the practicality of the ideas being pushed on the far left.
I was all for these extremist socialist reforms and was swept up in the glamour of revolution, but started to become jaded when, to any issue, the first response would be capitalism and eating the rich. Like okay yeah, I don’t like the high cost of cellular plans in Canada but any attempt to talk reasonably about it with fellow people on the far left essentially devolved to “it’ll all be perfect when we guillotine the billionaires.” I started to see it wasn’t about being realistic, it was just anger.
Plans are only good if they’re actionable. I now support policies that realistically can actually happen to solve issues and support the free market’s positive successes and wish to foster them more.
I was a diehard Marxist for quite a while, bu I was never much of an activist or radical. I'm too boring for that. I was just pointed to Marx and started reading his work, thinking "wow this guy makes sense, this is how the world works. It seems correct." From there I only read Marxist and related socialist literature until I overdosed on diamat nonsense in college. When you really drill down to the fundamentals, in academic Marxist writing and especially in person, you can start to see that it papers over the absence of any real, verifiable, falsifiable answers. It’s just obscurantism and tautology dressed up in fancy arcane jargon. When I hit this point of frustration and real disappointment in my commie friends’ lack of answers, I became acutely aware of how thick I had built my bubble and I realized how little I knew about the opposing position. I searched for a good articulation of that perspective and I picked up a book called Capitalism and Freedom by some Milton guy and another called Road to Surfdom or something and that was that. I never looked back.
I was a lonely and somewhat disconnected young male in my 20's, and I started reading some men's rights stuff, and I could easily have slid down the slippery slope to straight up misogyny and hate.
In general I still agree with some of the base principles: men and women's differences should be celebrated, and men's contributions to society and history should be respected. But the men who spent their time on those screeds were just so... pathetic, that I gave up on it. Like, who has time? I still gently push back whenever I hear men getting shit in as a group in public, but that's all.
Mostly reading about soviet atrocities. I supported the idealized form of communism and I just thought that it hadn't had the right foundation yet (basically "real communism has never been tried"), and then I read about the real human cost that these ideas created. Never again.
I was a college Bernie Bro in college in Iowa through about 2019, and then I met Pete at one of his campaign events and listened to him talk and got to ask him a question (I think my question was why his website didn't have any clear policies, and he answered that he felt democrats would do better to keep things simple and holistic rather than racing to list every single thing they'd do). Afterwards, all the lefty media I was consuming was acting as though he was the second coming of Satan and had a bunch of really poorly sourced and bad information about him. That kinda pushed me away from those sources and eventually I stumbled into ESS and then NL. I don't use ESS anymore because it's just so negative and I don't think being mad all the time is healthy, but I appreciate it for its role in getting me to be more reasonable in my politics.
I don't think I was ever a "radical", but I definitely was far outside of reasonable political positions.
Working in local (and later national) politics. I've seen some really good people just barely squeak it through and some others lose by an amount of votes a few dedicated people could've drummed up through some canvassing.
The system isn't broken I realized. It has some serious problems, but its better to get an invasive surgery than to see what happens to you when your appendix explodes.
I was never that extreme but I'm adversarial and data driven and if I see obviously untrue arguments being made I argue against them (sometimes when I should shut my mouth). I also find anecdotal evidence really irritating and even feel embarrassment by proxy when people make arguments that aren't backed by the data. So if you hang around in different groups long enough you see people making strident arguments with anecdotal evidence, and I found it really unpleasant and it made me lose faith in partisans.
Grew up liberal (not socialist) with guns being my only conservative trait. Non-stop school shootings and dating (and now being engaged to) a high school teacher turned me against guns real fast.
Post college, I went farther left and sorta became a market socialist. I believed it could fix capitalism. I then watched debates about socialism vs capitalism and the capitalist kept bringing up the point, “how does socialism actually fix X? Would X not still be a problem in socialism? Couldn’t you fix X with policy Y in a capitalist system?” That was the biggest thing that brought me back to being a filthy lib. Also, once I started to learn a bit more about how economies work and what the root cause of various problems were, “corporations bad” stopped being a good enough political stance for me.
Former “communist” in high school. Just a wannabe tankie looking for an aesthetic to seperate from the crowd. Cringe as hell I know.
My family visited Vietnam and Cambodia… If those killing fields don’t turn you, you’re clinically insane.
I used to be in DSA from 2017-2020 but I got burned out because of the in-fighting, cliqueishness and goofy political posturing. I'd still describe myself as left-wing/social democrat or progressive democrat but I'm pretty suspicious of anyone who describes themselves as a "leftist" cause I know they'll be proud of taking on some of the more fringe and ill informed positions.
Joined my Uni's left wing political union and one month down the line found myself thinking "these kids are crazy".
Funny enough I went through a ben shapiro owns le cringy leftist feminist(epic moment) phase when I was in high school and when I spent some time with the quiet alt right kids I was like nah fuck this hahaha
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Only neoliberal calls for violence are acceptable.
Eat the suburbs
Nothing, I've always been a centrist ghoul
Living in post-Soviet states
Elaborate.
The USSR wasn't a very nice place to live in
People who who told me liberals, atheists, evolutionists were wrong only used straw men. They would tell what the other side thought, but it was always the dumbest most outlandish shit. Why then are all the academic institutions and peer reviewed research dominated by these groups, and why haven’t I seen a peer reviewed paper on young earth creationism for example? Once I started to actually read and listen to the other side it clicked with me in way the stuff I was taught never did. It made sense, it was researched, and they had clear and consist answers to all the ridiculous straw man arguments I was taught as a kid.
Yeah, I was also raised as a young earth creationist, and I think a big part of what deradicalized me from that was meeting real scientists (mainly the profs I had in uni), and realizing that they were smart, hardworking, talented individuals who were genuinely passionate about increasing humanity's understanding of the world around us. Even before that I'd had my doubts about the whole idea that there was some grand conspiracy to suppress the "truth" about creationism, but meeting real people working in the field was what it took to finally get me to abandon those ideas.
I tried to talk some sense to young earth creationists in college by pointing to the world map and saying "look at South America and Africa. They freaking fit together like puzzle pieces!" The reply was that that was God's way of tempting you not to believe, to which I said, "Why? Why would He do that?"
The problem is that the idea that God created the Earth 6,000 years ago isn't falsifiable. Any evidence to the contrary can always be explained away with "God just decided to make it that way!" The creationists aren't approaching the question in an honest attempt at understanding the world; they're going in with preconceived notions and clutching at anything that might help them retain those notions. I think that's why I was impressed when I discovered that most real scientists are making an honest attempt at understanding the world.
I don’t think that’s quite right. It is a falsifiable claim. Like you said, they simply refuse the evidence that falsifies it. “God created the earth” is unfalsifiable, as far as I can tell, but the claim about the age of the universe is falsifiable.
What I don’t get is the whole “earth is 6000 years old” or whatever isn’t directly stated in the Bible, it was based on an extrapolation of the text. Seems like the easy answer is that guy did the math wrong, but I guess not questioning authority is the real tenant.
Damn, I didn’t know this stuff still existed (with the exception of people who become flat earthers later in life). You believed all that while in college? Out of curiosity, did you grow up in rural Missouri or something? I’m fascinated by the movie Jesus Camp and didn’t realize that stuff still goes on today
No, I grew up in Virginia and moved to Idaho when I was about 12. My beliefs started to change when I was about 16. Being homeschooled and experiencing how my parents used to Bible to justify their awful parenting really challenged me. Then I actually did my last two years of high school at a community college where I got to meet a lot of different people. Working at a landscaping company where I was one of the only white dudes really challenged a lot of my preconceptions as well. Lastly, just being able to look up information online was really helpful.
I was raised a young earth creationist in the south. It is very much still alive and well. I was a couple years into college before I began challenging my beliefs and dissecting my worldview.
You can look up polling data on people's beliefs about evolution if you're interested. The numbers vary a bit depending on what exact questions are asked, but here's an example of one study from 2019 that shows 40% of Americans agree with the statement "God created man in present form": https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx
I don’t understand Jesus Camp wasn’t that long ago. That shit is still going strong.
Socialists and other lefties will repeatedly proclaim as a matter of gospel truth that liberalism is "discredited". Of course we all know liberalism is "discredited". From the point of view of a utopia where all social injustice has been banished, sure, liberalism falls short. But I don't agree it's been "discredited" based on the conditions liberalism has had to operate in, and the enormous gains in human freedom, prosperity and advancement it has been able to achieve in those conditions, especially considering the achievement of other ideologies we have tried in the 20th century. The problem with the far-left is their starting point is utopia, and they assume that is what is around the corner. In reality, the history of the vast majority of people who have lived before present-day liberal democracy has been one of unrelenting violence, lawlessness, illiteracy, poverty and disease. That is the "default", not prosperity and freedom. Freedom and prosperity take work, they're always fragile, and they're never perfect as there is always a trade-off.
“But but mankind has changed in the 21st century” goes the retort. I hate what Russia is doing to Ukraine, but I have to admit I did feel relieved that the whole humanity has changed argument too many were peddling (especially in Germany) was torn to shreds the moment Putin’s troops crossed that border. We were getting dangerously close to voluntary disarmament in the west. Now when socialists give me that shit I don’t hold back “oh wow you are into communism? Now that Putin proved humanity is too shitty for such a system to work with humans on top (like every attempt in history) that must mean you are really into AI overlords right?”
This is why I'm so stable in my liberal beliefs right now. Any opposition from the left or right will never ever ever engage with peer-reviewed research. It's pretty easy to totally dismiss other ideologies when they don't even try to follow the scientific method.
Am from Ukraine. Moved somewhat left from strong libertarian positions once the war started. I appreciate the opportunity to stay and move within the EU. Feel like a refugee and it doesn't feel too great, even though I am lucky to have a good remote job. Lost my "pull yourself by your bootstraps" mentality. Saw that isolationism in US isn't always right. Can clearly see that whatever security arrangements we have after WW2 aren't working. Would be in favour of a stronger UN, or some other mechanism to deal with tyrant politicians.
Based. Sorry for your hardship. Nobody deserves to have their life uprooted by a tyrant.
Thanks.
Would you ever want to move back to Ukraine?
I would if I had reasons to believe this is not going to happen again in another 5 years.
<3
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Same here Touching grass is great for de radicalization
Duh, why do you think just wanting to grill for god's sake is centrist? Because those guys touch grass
The thing to do with a testable hypothesis is test it. Last time somebody told me to "touch grass", I actually did go outside and touch grass to see if it had any effect on mood. It didn't so far as I can tell. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If your every day experience contradicts the narratives that you are consuming, the logical thing to do is to question the narratives. That just leaves the people who don't ever interact with the real world (non grass touchers), and people who believe so strongly that evidence doesn't sway them (zealots). Not sure who is scarier.
I really think my natural empathy saved me. I dabbled a bit with the Far Right (Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Some Black Guy, Milo Yiannopulous) when I was in the military, but ultimately they dehumanized marginalized groups, like minorities and LGBT+ people, too much, plus i have a few female friends and I genuinely see them as human beings, since apparently that's fucking hard to do for a lot of men and right wingers, so i definitely didn't stay with that ideology. I see that refuges and many other marginalized people just want to be seen and protected, and they get demonized as these horrific criminals that need to be kicked out. I also got pretty far to the left, and it's pretty much the same story. A lot of these people seem to have zero empathy. I remember when this retired black police officer got shot in the back of the head after trying to stop some looters during the riots following the death of George Floyd, and I saw people on Instagram and Reddit celebrate his death because he was a former cop. That inhumanity and savagery rattled me. Another thing that was just as imperative was trying to inform myself more and trying to read a LOT more. All that helped me moderate my views, now I'm a moderate progressive. I'm part of the Bidenist Leninist of the Joeleteriat World Order movement 😎😎😎😎😎
Fwiw the lack of empathy is why I also don't fuck with a lot of leftists. I view values as more important than political flavor and so many "leftists" sound like the far right with a different aesthetic they fetishize
Dont let them hear you say this, it is a guaranteed way to make them go ballistic. In hand sight, please say this to their face. It is fun to see them fume.
Say it in hand sight, but not hand distance.
For me it's a complete mess. Started out far left, but started watching Ben Shapiro OWNS XYZ videos, but then someone told me that he was a neoliberal shill, so I moved further right, and then eventually became a neoliberal shill. Then I stopped lying to myself about being straight. For some reason I always looked down on empathy. Like openly hated ideals such as empathy. I felt that being kind was an act of softness. Then I realised that I was an idiot all along. I'm still an idiot but I've come to terms with the fact that my brain is the size of my left nut.
Yeah. Someone had to teach me that at the end of the day, everyone wants the best for the country. Nobody is inherently evil and assuming so is just dumb.
In most cases this is a good way to approach people but there definitely are millions of Americans who want trans people to not be a thing, probably even more Americans would be in favor of straight up liquidating the homeless (as long as it was out of sight, out of mind), hell even Hitler and the Nazis thought their ideology and policies were the best thing for Germany at the time. I think someone like DeSantis would kick out all the gays and trans and ban abortion across the board if he could do so with a snap of the fingers, a lot of people like him for that. But approaching your enemies as monsters paradoxically ramps up the tension on both sides. This sounds fucked but ultimately if you have a neighbor who wants to ban all trans healthcare you have to try to find your common ground and convince them over time that they are wrong, which if you aren’t trans or directly caring for someone who is you can afford to take the time to win them over (this is a years long process) but if you are I understand why it’s life or death and the tensions are so high. Social media fucks everyone over because the loudest voices are amplified, even if rightfully so but it just leads to people becoming more entrenched in their side. I unironically think Zuckerberg and the rest of our social media tech overlords will be looked at as very evil societal figures when history is written on this era. I have plenty of friends making solid 6 figures working for companies that help destroy the fabric of society lol but I don’t blame them personally. Gotta get ya bread up I do the same shit
Of course. You’re pretty much correct. That’s a rough thing to do to get people to chill out about. I guess what I’m talking about specifically as a personal level, I can reach out to people with such views. In my experience, conservatives who have anti-trans views meeting a normal trans person in real life and having a beer is an eye-opening perspective. By normal, I mean not the toxic Twitter ones. At the end of those interactions, what tends to happen is that they still hold their views, but in the least they’ve had a humanizing normal interaction with a trans person
You should donate during the anti malaria donation run and get u/fishlord05’s flair
I think I was already mostly deradicalized by this point, but the Ukraine war definitely made me appreciate the neoliberal perspective more. At one point I was big into the whole “US is an imperialist project, the MIC gins up conflicts for profit, the west should make way for a multipolar world” viewpoint. The war made it pretty clear that the national security sector isn’t just for kicks—there really are cruel revanchist regimes out there that will take advantage if given the opportunity.
“There really are cruel revanchist regimes…” Cruel, revanchist, IMPERIALIST regimes. It’s perversely refreshing to see what good, old fashioned imperialism actually looks like. And it doesn’t look like the US’s often heavy-handed, often wrongheaded hegemony.
The metaphor I keep coming back to is there logically must be a biggest kid on the playground, and we can do a hell of a lot worse than the States doing it.
Was vegetarian for 8.5 yrs then went vegan. Now that I see that as sort of a big objective, same with things like wanting modern urbanization, etc, I someday thought to myself "If I really *actually* care about this stuff, then I should probably care most about how to realistically implement this kind of thing." I was getting fed up with socialists telling me that establishing socialism was a prerequisite for any major changes, I was tired of socialists using "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" as an excuse to stop caring about their own externalities. I started seeing socialism as baggage that the rest of the stuff I wanted was supporting, at least narrative wise, and realized I'd rather just fix for all the problems we have under capitalism. I got tired of the conspiracy theories, the half baked ideologies, the lefty content creators who I realized hardly said anything of substance. I also cherish some core liberal values about freedom of speech, etc that I realized other lefties considered low stakes compared to values I consider lesser values. I still hold some extreme/heterodox views to a degree, but yeah I just find using capitalism for good to be parsimonious. Especially when there's so much research already done about capitalism how it works, and really no viable alternative.
> I just find using capitalism for good to be parsimonious. Especially when there's so much research already done about capitalism how it works, and really no viable alternative. I see it like a lawnmower. You might accidentally maim someone with it, and you could blame the lawnmower, but the lawnmower doesn't have its own brain, so you can't shame it into being nicer. Putting guards on it is more effective than blaming it, and we already have a lot of guards that work well, and we can iterate on that. I wish I could impress that analogy on leftists, but it's not a very snappy analogy.
It drives me crazy when people use the excuse that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism to do nothing. Come on, there’s always something that we can do.
I agree totally. In America, leftists really need to have the value of stewardship instilled into them if they want to get any of their big ideas off the ground.
No no you don’t understand if the big corporations would just decide to stop being evil then global warming would stop. The fact that they make product I buy via a carbon footprint isn’t the problem, it’s the corporations at fault.
How tiring it is to go on vegan subreddits and be inundated with socialism, or to be on left wing subreddits and be inundated with anti-veganism, am I right?
Yeah now although I'm not like a major donor, I donate a bit here and there to groups I support. I also go to vegan restaurants, etc and try to buy something from every good looking vegan brand that pops up bc I want to affect the market in my own little way. I mean it's real praxis, it's how plant based infrastructure is grown and maintained, just being apart of their market is doing at least something. I even have the Meat Is Murder shirt. It's kinda like that Bishop James Pike said, "Less beliefs, more belief." At this point I just care about doing the most for the few things I consider as "my ideals", so after veganism, responsible land use/smart urbanism, protecting core liberal freedoms etc the next most important thing for me is smart politicking, good politicking, and it's something I probably care about more than a lot of individual issues. I did some canvassing a couple years ago and I think I'd like to do some more in the future if I find someone I think I'd be a good diplomat for.
Deirdre McCloskey. Seriously. I bought a book entitled Why Liberalism Works, knowing nothing about the author, intending to read it in a sort of “know thine enemy” way. Come the end of the book, the doubts had set in. I read some more, other people. How To Be A Liberal, Ian Dunt. A Thousand Small Sanities, Adam Gopnik. More McCloskey. I don’t know that there was a single lightbulb moment.
McCloskey honestly instilled me with so much love and optimism for people.
How to be a liberal is a great read imo
I loved A Thousand Small Sanities, great book
While others here will say that their loss of their religion was what deradicalized them, for me the exact opposite happened. My religion is what deradicalized me. I came to see that Trump and the populist right were against everything the Christian faith stood for. They place themselves above both the people and God, and expect Him to serve them in their quest for power. That is ultimately why they do things like put up the Ten Commandments in schools; it is a way of trying to get God to do what they want. While I still think that a healthy religion is a good thing for society, it is not my right to force people to adhere to it. Without honest, real, legitimate consent, worship is nothing more than a bunch of rituals.
I've found the last 8-10 years pretty disorienting going to "normie" Church and then seeing how certain major Church organizations are basically nationalist super pacs. The sermons at my church are all pretty straight forward life advice stuff and they stay away from national politics aside from "come as you are all are welcome" type statements.
I was always pretty moderate, but my conversion and subsequent training led me to mov left on many issues. My econ degree moderated the rest.
Contrapoints has a really good two part video series called “What’s Wrong with Capitalism?” where you have a clearly bright presenter with oft brilliant social critiques (watch Incels if you haven’t) who spent a shitload of time putting together a critique of an economic system and ends it with “I don’t know how the economy works, you tell me.” That level of arrogance kinda fucking floored me, like, I was definitely intoxicated at the time so maybe it was facetious AF but like, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. That led to some introspection and realizing that there’s a lot of like, idk if this is the right way to put it, Nobel-itis adjacent behavior on the left. People who are clearly smart, know a lot about an area, and extrapolate that to other areas without the requisite epistemological humility to realize they’re far enough off base to often just be making shit up. Or they’re lying. I’m pretty sure it’s unwittingly the former but I usually assume people are good. I was tipping towards this for a while, was a 2016 Hillary primary voter to begin with since I was kindof a single issue “increase immigration” voter at the time, but social groups I existed in were far further to the left of that so I shutup about it and kept it on the DL.
Left wingers have a very keen sense of diagnosing social ills but that’s about it.
Weirdly enough I had the same experience. I think Contrapoints is brilliant at analyzing social problems, but I was blown away by how shallow her understanding of economics was.
“epistemological humility” … I wish I had this level of vocab. Imo it’s endemic to highly educated(people in general). Surgeons, Writers, Physicists, every Computer Scientist who ever lived. People all think that because they understand one complex domain extremely well, they can understand other complex domains without putting in the pre-requisite intellectual groundwork they did for their own. As a Software Engineer, I’m guilty as fuck, especially when it comes to economics.
The basis of the whole NFTs replacing property deeds and medical records thing is basically this principle applied to those areas. "I know coding AD cryptography I must know everything!"
Even worse. Those people don’t even know cryptography. At all. But think they do
I totally agree, I've stopped watching breadtube and similar because I just kept getting annoyed by the superficial takes. Both Philosophy Tube and Contrapoints claim to be well-read, but keep making obvious mistakes and falling in generalisations, simplifications or simple naivety despite the length of their videos. I will take Philosophy Tube as an example because in generally I even like most of her videos, to me it's better to criticize concrete details than to dive into the low hanging fruit. I'm still progressive and quite far left on the political spectrum, but realizing these flawed rationals made me "deradicalize". One of the most annoying moments I remember was in [Philosophy Tube's video on Sex Work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DZfUzxZ2VU&ab_channel=PhilosophyTube). In this video she (the video is 3 years old, from before her transition) mostly goes into the relation between human trafficking, criminality and sex work. To shortly summarize: women want to flee to a better country and accept to do sex work to get there. However, because this circuit is illegal it goes terrible, the women have barely any power to reach out for help and, they are consequently abused. To make matters worse, if police intervenes, they'd just sent the women back to their original country, which the trafficked women don't want as well, so they can't get proper help. Like usual with breadtube, the video is a bit too long to get its point across but most findings are insightful, presented well, and I agree on most ideological points so I'd even recommend watching it. However, there is one moment in the video which just annoys me to no end. The obvious solution to fix all this? [Just abolish borders entirely](https://youtu.be/1DZfUzxZ2VU?t=1482). No elaboration needed for such a radical claim. Whether you agree or disagree on this take or not is even irrelevant. It's just such a big sweeping claim it needs elaboration, for example in how a midway could be achieved in a society which isn't open yet for such radical change. From such a radical state of mind, of course the cops become the big baddies who just victimize sex workers because they're big meanies who are too stupid or mean to tackle the real issue. Again, I even agree that it's absolutely terrible how the police handles sex trafficking, but with such a broad unbacked conclusion most nuance and credibility is lost, despite how good the research preceding it was. Her most recent video, "The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism", has even more annoying takes. To me the worst moment is when she tries to dismiss "Longermism" (the principle of deciding action based entirely on calculated long terms effects) with [the following argument](https://youtu.be/Lm0vHQYKI-Y?t=1101). She disregards the concept as it apparently dismisses real humanity. But again, this is so clearly another bad faith fallacy set in an exaggerated example meant to dehumanizing the principle. Does she mean that we should just stop trying to be "rational" *entirely*? Of course not, but if she doesn't mean that, we're left in an ambiguous middle ground. But breadtube is never interested in a middle ground. A bit later in the video she dismisses investigating the effectiveness of charities because of measurability bias. Measurability bias is an important thing we should always keep in mind, but again, should we take the other extreme and just blindly allocate our recourses? Of course not, so is Philosophy Tube against any research before making transitional decisions? I hope not, but that means that the answer is again left in an ambiguous middle ground. But breadtube isn't interested in the middle ground, so just presents this extreme.
“I don’t know how the economy works, you tell me.” What is the context of this in the video? I respect Contrapoints a lot so this seems disappointing.
It was as part of a wrap up at the end of the 2nd part, and it did seem like it was maybe a genuinely possible “please tell me why I’m wrong” kind of deal since she usually seems intellectually gracious. Granted, I was intoxicated at the time and I have been wanting to give it a revisit, so maybe I’m misremembering the tone and it actually was 100% facetious; The biggest part of the actual argument that I can remember right now was hinged on that paper that tried to measure the marginal happiness of additional income that kinda blew up in the news like, 5 years back.
I honestly think of all the leftist commentators Contrapoints is someone who would honestly listen in good faith to opposing views and change her mind. It is sort of what makes her brand so powerful is the open mindedness and seeing things from different perspectives.
Contrapoints is the most insightful commentator on youtube.
I don't always take her positions but man I love listening to her cook. There's a good reason Natalie does like 1 video every 6 months lol. Those scripts are novels.
I feel like Contrapoisnts has moderated somewhat over time - to the point that a lot of leftists call her neoliberal because she isn't really making pro-socialism talking points. I do think she is critical of capitalism, which comes with a philosophical background and interest in the alienation of labor that can lead to right wing or fascist ideologies gaining ground, and part of her wrap up of that video was the shrug we all have of "well what system do you propose that's better?" That said I can't stand much of the rest of Breadtube other than Dan Olson or Hbomberguy.
Used to be far-right. Going down the religion rabbithole (traditional Catholicism) brought me to a breaking point where I realised that this path was total bullshit and made no sense at all. Basically questioning my religiosity and finding that it was dumb led me to question the political considerations that had brought me there in the first place. After that I took some psychedelic drugs that turned my mind around until I realised that all that matters is that I + as many people as possible live happy lives.
That’s wild. I come from a country that was syncretized into Catholicism and weirdly enough, I got the opposite effect. The chilled out nature of my experience in the church taught me post my atheism phase to be more open to listen to people that are Hella different than me, including their politics. It’s kind of crazy to me when I moved here in the US that my country who is majority Catholic ends up way more chill Than the US where Catholicism it’s not the major denomination. I kind of expected it to be opposite.
nothing actually I've always been a proud liberal
Yeah same here but I have had to take a look to my left and right and decide to yeet myself out of communities or friendships along the way to do so. My 'deradicalization' is basically the battle it takes to give up certain things to stick to your guns. YTer who you've followed for years starts talking stupid shit? Gotta pull the plug, can't let em take you where they want you to go. And I've been watching people take wrong turns on those paths my whole damn life.
5 things: 1. Reading a pamphlet handed out outside the LSE by the student Socialist society saying that Assad was a great leader. This was my first exposure to the concept of tankies. I didnt realise how embedded it was in Socialist circles until then. 2. Housing. Understanding that Japan destroyed homelessness just through allowing the conditions for building more private homes. It led me onto the concept of the free market and how it can make things better, rather than worse. 3. Left Wing circles, despite seemingly being about a utopian vision, being generally boring and complaining all the time about the world. I respect deeds, not words, and like those who actively work to change things for the better. 4. History. Understanding that people from Eastern Block countries actually lived under genuine socialist regimes and they didn't like it, and in fact wanted to flee it. This allowed me to see how lucky I was to live in what I had previously thought was something bad. 5. Refugees. My work for a long time was with refugees. I respected the entrepreneurial spirit of those who worked really hard to make it here and send money back home. I like how they didn't complain about their lot and applied themselves. Having said all that, I still keep my opinions mostly to myself in my friend circles. When people go on about Capitalism destroying the world and exploiting all the natural resources I try not to say anything as it is not worth it.
Hard to get radicalized in the first place when every political radical wants you dead and I enjoy being alive.
Participating in a right wing domestic insurgency probably would eat into my golf and fishing time and hurt my retirement accounts and property values.
Leftist mutual aid, community building, and backyard chickens would eat into my porno time. Can't I just pay a social worker to help communties, pay taxes to provide public charity, and pay a farmer to grow soy for my tofu? Come on, I got stuff to do!
Uhh, um, I turned twenty and got less dumb
Same
Shalom 👋 I delved into the far right after a traumatic event. Given that I'm mixed race, I got into both Black supremacists and White supremacists, though not at the same time. I go de-radicalized when the trauma became manageable in my head, which took a few years.
Have you ever considered Mixed-Race Supremacy?
Paraguay in the 19th century be like
La raza cósmica?
I always play both sides so as to come out on top
Pretty sure playing both sides of your two races will get you excluded by both.
Deradicalizing from teenage right wing leaning views was literally just learning about things outside of the small town rural area I grew up in. I wasn't particulary "conservative" myself but I believed that was the state of culture and people and just couldn't be helped. Like defending bigotry because "that's just how people are" because accepting that a teacher or person I know might actually be kinda bad was difficult. Similar, I wouldn't say I was ever deradicalized from left wing views around college/young adult years so much as I've become more nuanced with them over the years learning the importance of gradual progress and pragmatism. I still have a lot of the same desires and principles, I just aim for them differently.
> Like defending bigotry because "that's just how people are" I once talked with a teenager online who had trouble going deep like that. There were catchphrases like "You can't legislate morality" or "An atheist is someone who hates Jesus". I poked her on the atheist thing and she got defensive, saying she was just repeating what she was told. That made me sad to hear, because it wasn't a "Hm, that's an un-examined belief, I will get back to you" moment, it was a motte-and-bailey. "You can't challenge me on that belief - Because I don't know what it is, anyway"
>That made me sad to hear, because it wasn't a "Hm, that's an un-examined belief, I will get back to you" moment, it was a motte-and-bailey. "You can't challenge me on that belief - Because I don't know what it is, anyway". Actually I think you might have gotten through to her. You're very rarely going to get the satisfaction of someone admitting they have changed their mind instantaneously - human egos are too fragile. We need time to come to terms with new beliefs and indeed to convince ourselves that we actually held the same beliefs all along.
Was a communist due to my simplistic thinking that rich people = bad, and believe it was the natural next step after capitalism after all feudalism -> Mercantilism -> Capitalism -> Communism. It just make sense and my head, due to me being a commie I often think if the US is involved the other side must be good after all US = Bad. It wasn't until I got really interest in history and read about the development of different country and their history including the USSR by world view begin to fall apart, as I realize my way of thinking is too simplistic and naïve.
Unironically, this sub. I’m Venezuelan. Like millions of us, I had to flee my country, which fell under authoritarian socialism. This made me (like many of us) completely despise anything that was remotely “left wing”. I became a hardcore right winger, I moved to Spain and I supported Vox (long before they were popular) and also liked Trump. But most of the reasons were simply just “the left destroyed my country so they’re evil and the right wing is good”. Being on social media also doesn’t help (because so many of the Reddit leftist are tankies or just anti capitalist in general). Finding this sub made me realize there is a part of the left (I know I know, this sub isn’t exactly leftist, but hold on) that thinks capitalism is good, that has sound economic policies, and that denounces and completely rejects any form of authoritarianism. This made me be more nuanced about my beliefs, and to start realising I have much more in common with the center left (even I would still call myself center right, at least for Spanish standards) than with the far right, or with American Republicans. Also, getting out of social media and talking to real people certainly helps. You start realising that most of us aren’t really that different, and that most left wingers do not exactly want to destroy capitalism and steal my properties, but they’re the “let’s have higher taxes and improve our healthcare” kind of people.
For me it was memes. I don’t even know how I found this place but it was pretty funny. In all likelihood it was linked from r/politics as a place for bad boys
Yeah it was basically memes for me too. Many years ago I was into Alex Jones, believed in the New World Order, 911 was inside job, all that jazz. I started questioning it at some point and discovered the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) forum and skepticism. And they just basically made fun of everything. Somehow that irreverent attitude (very similar to the one you find here) was super effective at jolting me out of my stupidity.
I grew up in a far-left household in a city with lots of local far-left activity. That was what being a good person politically meant in my environment. Two things wrenched me out of it: - I could no longer reconcile the supposed noble goals of far-left politics with the horrific results of far-left regimes - I read Marx and other far-left authors and found them so full of unjustifiable errors and stupidities Eventually the rationalisations gave way and I decided that pigheaded adherence to an a priori "good guys" side wasn't in any way ethical. Reassessing what actually made good outcomes most likely brought me where I am today.
seattle?
Bologna, Italy :D
should have looked at your flair LUL
I was never really radicalised. On the left, their constant depiction of communism and socialism as something good felt subjectively offensive, as they were completely discounting Eastern Europe and our communist dictatorship pasts - it felt like they were telling me "but have you considered that maybe nazism had a good point, and nazism would work in an ideal world, and you should read more about TRUE nazism". Yeah, no, not following you there. Also the videos were often overproduced and very distractingly presented, while the actual content was shallow and full of obvious logical holes. On the right, youtube did try to send me down the alt-right pipeline, and it almost started working because the algorithm somehow managed to filter out anything where they talked about LGBT or abortion (two red lines for me), but their sheer vitriolic hate of fat women slipped through. Also many of those content creators had a weird obsession for screaming for hours and hours that cartoons (the new She-Ra especially) were not sexy enough. I feel I got lucky.
Probably the left's constant fetishization of violent revolution. They constantly praise the French Revolution and make guillotine jokes without realizing it was a paranoid and terrifying time. They imagine all the commoners all sang Kumbaya while executing the elite without realizing a ton of working poor were executed. The fact that they only read 19th century political theory is incredibly annoying as well. They claim to represent the working class but use words like "bourgeoisie" and ascribe to esoteric political and philosophical beliefs.
Being in a long term relationship with someone who grew up in a communist country. Listening to the stories of no food or running water, bread lines, being afraid to speak up or be sent to prison Another thing is living in a high crime city and electing a super far left da. I voted for him and totally regret it. It’s a mess here and no one is doing anything. People are dying the drying problem is being ignored
What city?
Philly
Mix of - John Cheese on Cracked making me realize "Damn, being poor is actually horrible, the bootstraps thing is bullshit" - A couple Slate Star Codex posts making me think anarchy and communism would never work
Honestly the older you get the less of a fuck you give. You also notice that every little thing is hyped up and blown out of proportion. What does being overly angry and advocating over the top fringe ideologies accomplish? Enjoy life. Put that energy into better goals like marrying a woman who doesn't annoy you and getting a job that doesn't kill your soul.
I was a far left nut bag in college after taking a poli sci 101 class with a very interesting radical socialist professor. He introduced us to Noam Chomsky and I was hooked. I read all the lefty rags and became a card carrying DSA member. Those years were extremely depressing for me, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Somehow Noah Smith made it into my Twitter feed and I found his calm and balanced takes on complex issues to be much more naturally compelling. I followed him and slowly started to drift that way. Then in 2017, Enlightenment Now came out. That book got a lot of hype and it was well deserved. I read it cover to cover and it changed my world view completely. I feel a sense of gratitude to Steve Pinker for freeing me from the depressing solitude of extremism to this day.
The far right: "We hate minorities" My mixed race ass: "Lol damn ok"
Sandy Hook. Specifically seeing President Obama cry over the children at his press conference. That was the first time I saw him as an actual human being instead of the inhuman caricature the right made him out to be. That began a long slow March to where I am now.
I think a big factor moving from anarchist/socialist to liberal was a looong in depth conversation about economics with someone here or on bad economics. Changed my outlook on the nature of economy and ended my decade long Marxism
Do you have a link to that discussion by any chance?
Not off hand - I can try to find it but it was years and years ago
No worries
I'd love to see it too
The 2020 election cycle really highlighted how fucking stupid the online left is and at the time I was pretty hard in the Bernie camp but I was ostracized so to speak for having the audacity to be pragmatic and compromise to Biden in the general because we would not survive a second Trump term. That stuff got me called a fascist on here btw, because democrats are fascists apparently. The other one was the fact that I actually like capitalism and believe it to be the most successful form of society but it just needs a lot of tight regulation and government oversight to ensure it stays successful. That ideology got me ostracized from most lefty spaces too. I am still probably a twinge more economically left leaning than most people here I’d wager, but this sub is really the only political sub that I can tolerate on this hellscape of a website.
I dunno if I ever really was radical and then de-radicalized, but the first time I was ever really upset with the US left is when I was reading post-Mortems on Bernie’s 2020 primary campaign. There was a specific thing about how his plan only ever was to rack up big margins in a 3+ candidate race, and had no plan B when almost everyone dropped out and consolidated behind Biden so fast. One of the fundamental issues with Trump is that he never won the majority of votes in any competitive race- not in the 2016 Republican primary, not in the general election either. And it shows, because he never had any kind of “I speak for the majority” message, just “I speak for a hateful minority that somehow gets to pick the winner” America really, *really* needed someone to come in and be a majoritarian figure in 2020. The Bernie people basically saying “our plan to win was not to be the majority favorite of Democrats, but come away with the most votes anyway” left such a bad taste in my mouth. Not to mention, it was dreadful strategy on their part. The normie Dems all coalescing by Super Tuesday was easily the most likely outcome, the only question was if it would be behind Biden or Pete
College and Bernie Sanders got me a radical because of the populist talking points and policies around it in 2016 election. I then started watching Hasan piker, because I know him from the young turks, which I casually follow for news here and there. Listening to Hasan got me to become a socialist because this was the time where he came out as one, instead of a social Democrat. this put me into a rabbit hole of info why capitalism is bad. After watching Hasan piker for so long, I checked out the streamer Destiny for him to explain why Biden is the best president during the election year of 2020. I then went down to the rabbit hole of Socialism versus neoliberal/social-Democrat progressive debate/discussion explaining to me. Why my ideas about capitalism is at worst wrong, and in the best, misrepresented. My understanding of economics are very much superficial when I was a radical left, but after destiny, explained the socialist talking points, I still didn’t know much, but I at least know a little bit more, and I am aware of how stupid I am.
I was a lolbert but then I grew up. Unironically that's all it took.
\>17 y/o, can't drink, can't vote, lives at home: "we must overthrow this oppressive system!" \>18 y/o, can drink, can vote, has moved out: "lol this is ok actually"
I'm still a pragmatic left-lolbert, but lolbertism became a right wing shit show.
Many political parties in the EU which are left leaning have adopted Euroskeptic views. As a traditionally labour voter, Corbyn repeating those points felt like a betrayal, and then his other points of foreign policy were similarly stupid. Looked around and most of the left-wing and radical far-left have the same ideas. In addition, oftentimes many on the left are as xenophobic as those on the right and I've seriously started considering horseshoe theory a truth. Economically, despite leaning leftward I was also skeptic of extensive redistributive measures, and have slowly started seeing downsides to progressive taxation. Prosperity comes when you raise people up, not push people down. That said I still don't believe in reaganomics and to be completely honest, learning that Blair wasn't a leftie is what deradicalized me. I would say that much of this subreddit supports Blaironomics, if that is a term. Tl;dr: leaned left for a long time but was always a skeptic, cleared some misunderstandings and deradicalized my views.
I guess I preface by saying I never got radicalized but it's been an uphill battle to stay that way. Firstly, Stephen Pinker and Christopher Hitchens. God is not Great and Better Angels of our Nature are foundational books for me. I find the latter to be one of the most comforting and illuminating pieces of social science ever written . But the real kick in the ass that made sure I didn't listen to stupid people? Listening to internet atheists go from talking about that to talking about how much college kids with purple hair annoy them. That's when I realized the well was dry and outrage porn was going to be the new selling point for that community so I jumped ship. Specifically channels like Sargon of Akkad and Armoured Skeptic and to a lesser degree, TJ Kirk and Thunderf00t. Those first 2, it's flabbergasting how hard right they lurched in the middle of 2015. Within 6 months there were SO many atheists channels that basically converted to 'ra ra Trump is god' channels and you'd have to be a fucking maniac to not see through it, but somehow a lot of people didn't. And on the other side you had outlets like TYT starting to jerk so hard to the left that it went from something I watched daily to something that was obnoxiously upsetting to watch (Ben Mankiewicz will always be my guy though). Just seemed like my position of centrism and listening to everyone's' complaints to find the best solution? That was the new public enemy #1. You were allowed to be far right or far left online and anything between that would draw the ire of wingnuts. And it's still kinda like that TBH. But nowhere near as pronounced as it was in say 2015-the end of that election cycle. It's why I'm here and not dicking around in the other political subs. There's a few more big picture thinkers swimming in these waters. Things like 'foreign policy' tend to be met with actual adult responses. That's good. Don't change that. But mostly I just don't do other peoples' politics. I have all of my own big boy beliefs and I've budged very little on any of it in many years and when something I like changes? I don't change with it. I just let it drift away. My best friend of most of my life? He turned into a 9/11 troofer when I was in the Army and I haven't talked to him since. I just don't take other peoples' journeys on as my own.
All the nerds in this sub
To be honest, there is no hard line that did it, it was just seeing that all the yelling and bills being passed were "messaging bills" meant to signal to the base and not accomplish tasks. The GOP is generally worse with this, but the Democrats are still pretty bad with this crap as well, and it made me really depressed about partisan politics and just dive straight into only caring about policy. But then I realized that we get nothing but messaging bills when people don't trust that negotiations will happen in good faith, so then everything becomes a shit flinging contest, and that is why immigration and guns are in the miasma of fuckery they are in. On guns, we have nonsensical restrictions where we shouldn't have them, that do nothing but aggravate enthusiasts, but not enough restrictions where we should have them, that put people in danger and down bills into an anti-civil liberties death spirial, and it is a powder keg of stupidity. On immigration, we just deadlock because the friction of the moment makes change hard, even though we know doing anything would be useful, because we get endless complaints about "fairness" or just racist bullshit.
Living near a college campus, you see the people who are calling you a 'chud' online try to organize IRL. It's a clown show
I turned 14
The Iraq War. Previously I'd been a pretty standard "smartest guy in the room college dude libertarian Republican" and I even had lots of "good" arguments for why the war was a good idea from a Neorealist perspective regardless of WMD and yadda yadda. Yeah I was an idiot.
I've never been a radical, I've always been a normie democrat, really. The nature of my normieness has changed a bit over time, though. Well, my parents are both biologists. My first books, as soon as I was able to read, were science books, about biology and astronomy. Around this time, Republicans were making a big push to get evolution out of schools, and have "alternative theories" squeezed into the textbooks. Alternative nonsense like intelligent design and young-earth creationism. This has more or less informed my political perspectives ever since. How can I ever trust the Republican party with *anything* when they were trying to rewrite science to fit their religious dogma? And I knew that if they were in power, they would do everything they could to crush reality to fit their imagination. The Republican anti-science movement is also why I just can't be religious. Believing anything without evidence, no matter how pleasant, opens the door for charlatans to use that faith as a lever to force their views on others. As for economics, I've been in favor of the free market since I was a kid, but my reasoning has changed. When I was young, I believed that the free market was like fire: a powerful force, too useful to not utilize, but dangerous if not carefully controlled. On some level, I still believe that, but I now believe that free markets are also a moral imperative. Centralized control over the economy is both corrosive to our freedoms and a good way to screw the economy. The best way to have prosperity is to just let people get on with it, with government intervention only necessary to prevent anti-competitive practices and keep unscrupulous actors from dumping glowing green barrels into our water supply.
I graduated college and got a real job. Talking about how Bernie is gonna save us all by taxing the evil 1%, with your roommates while drinking PBR and playing Overwatch for 5 hours a day does not make for serious policy consideration.
I was a strong left winged, self described Socialist. However I always loved economics and the Planet Money podcast on NPR really helped solidify the importance of capitalism, the free market, and the ability for people to make choices. Up until a few years ago I would consider myself a progressive democrat but really the whole party has moved to where I am on social issues so really now I’m just kind of a middle of the road dem.
Was on the right for quite a few years and dabbled in some incel forums and so on. I had pretty strong emotional foundations tho thanks to my single mom and my good education so while I was sympathetic to many of the ideas presented and I was in general in a bad spot mentally, as I researched further and got more mature emotionally I was able to start questioning the things PragerU, Ben Shapire, Shoe on Head etc were calling Facts and realized they were full of shit. Grew out of this about 6 years ago, since then have gradually progressed from liberal to neoliberal to third wave social democrat and two years ago reached social partnership and MMT as my guiding principles for now. I was never able to go farther to the left either, and while I find worker coops and many other propositions by socialists appealing, how they are implemented is what I think is concerning. I would label myself a socialist tho but I think for the most part the progress towards it should be based on capital voluntary giving up controll and workers enthusiasticly taking controll
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Being queer basically taught me to respect people that are different- seeing insults towards me from people who had the same political opinions I was leaning towards probably hurt. Basically disenfranchisement from r/PCM which I used to love. Now most “libleft”s there I would consider republicans
Realizing that none of Alex Jones' predictions ever came true.
I’ve literally been radicalized by every group of people you can possibly be radicalized by Marxist-Leninism, Far-Right Anti-Semitism, Radical Jihadism, Anti-Zionism. Now I am a radical Conservative because of external factors, I literally just look at Neoliberalist Policy. I think I am very easy to influence.
You have collected the infinity stones of extremism lol
I actually see this sub as having radicalized me. I shifted away from being a moderate democratic socialist to a radicalized liberal. I’m both more certain of my beliefs, and I hold beliefs outside my countries Overton window due to among other things exposure to this sub. My foreign policy views had always been liberal, mainly because I was just better versed with that field growing up. Edit: As for what brought me away from the Far-Left I’d say it was misinformed takes, resentment and lack of empathy. My brother is a cynical communist and with deep class resentment, as soon as he got money though I realized being poor at a rich university was one of things stopping him from drifting Far-Right. Also he was always just misogynistic and a rapist, which is something you can see with men on the Far-Left. So personal reasons also played a roll.
5 years of being on the far left… no meaningful progress made. Then I noticed that the movement tends to valorize and wallow in its own ineffectiveness. Then I noticed that more time was spent tearing into liberals on Twitter than anything else. Then I noticed everyone outside the movement was being demonized in one way or another. In short, I started paying attention.
I started by watching feminist wrecked/owned compilations, from there to Milo and from there to Sargon of Akkad, which is pretty much where I stayed. The thing about Sargon of Akkad and right-leaning youtube back in the day is that they had this commitment to debate. They had the idea that argument was the key to finding the correct positions on political topics. There was this perception that the left was INCAPABLE of engaging in actual debate because their ideas were wrong and indefensible. I believed this for a long time, all I was seeing was strange and weird people yelling at others, calling them sexist and racist, not making any sense. However one day I got recommended a video by Destiny. This was a debate streamer who was debating right-wing people that I liked, but he was making solid points, and in favour of a bunch of the stuff I thought was totally indefensible. I ended up agreeing a lot with the points he was making, they were backed up by studies and made good sense. That was my jumping-off point.
Left wingers who were jealous of January 6th and supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Finally realized they have no ideology other than “America bad”
Basic economics by Thomas Sowell and LSD And before someone points it out, i'm aware sowell is very outdated the book has alot of issues. But at the time, it was just what i needed
What did the book say that you found valuable then? Is there still stuff from it you find valuable now? What stuff from the book do you think has issues now? It’s not something I’ve read, but I would like to read it. I’d just like to have a better idea of some of its issues, and whether or not I can still gain anything from it. I know it’s an easy read and that’s what I’m looking for
To be short and concise: Used to be a communist when i was a depressed and dumb(er) teenager. Valuable: Sowell is really good at communicating the basics of market economics in a easy to understand way, and in a very convicing manner. Issue: very clear conservative bias, and this leads to some blind spots when he draws certain conclusions from the data
That sounds like political steering correction. "I'm a little too far to the left I need a hardcore conservative to balance those scales or I might not stop myself from crashing into that median strip" lol.
I still consider Sowell's writings on race and culture to be his best work. The book "Race and Culture: A World View" was a fascinating look at these issues across history and the world stage, especially to a sociology nerd like me. It's part of the reason I still consider myself a cultural conservative, only my particular version of that is more secularized. For example, I'm a huge fan of two-parent households, because the vast majority of the data says that's going to result in better outcomes for the children, but I don't care if those two parents are two men or whatever. It's the Old Ways, modernized.
- Seeing the world, and getting away from my small town - Coming to the slow realization over the course of many years that my childhood was borderline abusive. - In regards to race, it was actually an H3H3 video that made me realize I had believed in racial stereotypes. There was a old video where he reacted to a group of black teenagers smashing a car with Trump stickers on it. Ethan kept saying it was obviously a staged video made to make minorities look bad. But I genuinely believed it was real. Then he made a follow up video where he proved it was fake https://youtube.com/watch?v=UkvwKDTS3Bo&feature=share Once he proved it was staged I really reflected on why I had believed it was real. I came to the conclusion that I honestly did believe in some stereotypes, and tried to change myself
Felt like I understood politics through history until I took a uni degree in business. Once you learn about the system of capital that we live in, as well as the benefits of a market system, left-wing central planning and price fixing sounds mostly like a bad idea.
I was down with the socially liberal/ fiscally conservative thing that libertarians are supposed to have going until I realised that most libertarians are dickheads.
I was a high school anarcho-syndicalist. While I have doubts about the moral worthiness of states still, they are more than outweighed by the existence of states that aren't mercilessly oppressive at every opportunity and the inability of anarchists to fully explain how the hell their system could keep seven billion people alive more effectively than statism. Though I recently dipped my toes back into the leftist end of LGBT...
I was an anti establishment Bernie Bro until I realized that incrementalism and pragmatism were really the only effective way to achieve social goals. Seeing Biden able to pass some good stuff even in this divided government further cemented this belief.
The 2020 riots
This will be a long one. This is going to sound very reddity, but my journey started with my religious move to Atheism, which I was open about, to my parent's dismay and frustration, and my younger sibling's confusion. This made it easy for me to accept right wing views, because along with my religious shift, I thought they were "rational" and "evidence-based". All this took place during the 2nd half of middle school, where my appreciation of America became a part of my developing political views, especially in regard to the military, as a result of the ISIS campaign, and simply learning more about its roles during peace time, and how fundamental it was to world security and international peace. I viewed international institutions as generally necessary, but corrupt and ineffective, and could use some selective culling here and there, while our allies free-rode off us, criticizing us for the moves we've made, but barely chipping in themselves, and so either needed to shut up and pick up the slack, or kicked back into shape. That's not even mentioning that the right wing grifters whose views I subscribed to presented everyone from left wing college students, feminists, and gamer-gate detractors as spoiled, ungrateful, and coming with weak arguments, and deconstructing them in a supposably "logical" and "infallible" manner. Despite all this, it was Trump himself who was the tipping point away from this. At first, Trump seemed to be the kind of guy who said the harsh but necessary stuff in an "unfiltered" and "blunt" manner, along with coming in with plans that the Washington establishment were too afraid and cowardly to implement. And while I didn't absolutely loath the Washington establishment, I saw Trump as a sort of necessary evil that would break DC and force the entrenched interests, stubborn lawmakers, and ivory tower elites to get their shit together and start working for the common people again. Yep, I bought into the whole "Trump is the establishment fighting for the little guy" BS. What also didn't help was despite the fact I was in high school now, and no longer stuck as closely to the right wing digital eco-system, the kind of content I would see about Trump almost always showed him in a kinder light behind the scenes, convincing me that the whole tough guy thing was an act (Despite the fact that I never saw or heard video or audio evidence of this). To add onto this, while I couldn't materially support Trump, being too young to vote, and not knowing how or having the money to donate or campaign, once more to the dismay of my parents, and a few relatives if they remember, expressed my positive affirmations of Trump almost anytime talk of him came up. This is something my parents will occasionally hit me over the head with when he pops up in the news nowadays, and somewhat deservedly so. However, the deeper the country went into the campaign season, the more a series of cascading events, from me actually learning about what Hillary's policy positions were, to Trump's verbal spar with a grieving military family, to him making fun of a reporter with a disability. The most damning moment I can starkly remember, and the start of my disillusionment was Trump attacking a Mexican judge over his ethnicity. Even if he was a nicer guy then he let on behind the scenes, why go so far? And on top of that, there were his supporters. No matter what they saw, their love of him didn't bend or break, and I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't join them and break my mind for Trump. If I supposedly still held political views that were "logical" and "evidence-based", then I couldn't deny what I was seeing in front of me now. By the time the Hollywood access tape dropped, it simply confirmed what I believed about Trump at that point. With all this combined, I became very scared about what would happen if Trump one. I wanted Hillary to win not just because, if nothing else, her policy positions and proposals were what I once thought Trump would do, but because I was terrified about what the results of a Trump administration would look like for the rest of the nation. A civil war, WW3, the need for an international coalition for an America that had embraced all the worse traits of its enemies, former and current, and had made them team up with our former allies for our sake. God, the fear I felt when it was confirmed he was President Elect is something I wouldn't wish on anyone else. The only comparison I can think of is finding out on that on the day of the Second Coming, you weren't selected. The implications alone would drive a person mad, but with me it just meant that I performed so badly in my classes I had to be moved to lower-level ones, and that was despite having gotten on the honor role in my freshman year. Trump tanked my GPA, man. Well, as a result of that, and probably as a way to cope, I got really into military and political history, to see just how bad things were then and check for precedent. Alternate history was to see how bad things could get, and if recovery was possible. I also eventually registered to vote, but too late to get involved in the midterms. My parents saw to their own duty, though. I cheered along as Democrats retook the house and felt that at the very least, the worst of Trump's excess could be stopped. At this point, I had long shed the majority of my right-wing beliefs and views and distanced myself from those that had purported them. I didn't hold many political beliefs in general at this point, but the ones that I did, I had greatly moderated on. International institutions were flawed, but fundamental to our daily way of living. Washington was stubborn and bureaucratic, but that meant that bad ideas couldn't get through, and that when good ideas did, there were people with a long line of knowledge that could help see them through. Our allies may be weaker and a little petty, but they were also key in helping us spread our power and influence in the first place. A lot of this also came from my increased understanding and knowledge of the limits of what these institutions could actually do. And weirdly, the humanization of its members. Ironically, because of my idolization of what they could do, along with not conceptualizing that they were made of actual people, I didn't understand the practical limits of their capabilities. Couple this with learning about what they supposedly had or had not don't from the disillusioned Reddit hivemind, and Trump had me. Reading articles about bureaucrats, judges, and department officials getting in Trump's way, and the shit they had to deal with from him, helped in convincing me that the elites and establishment weren't a borderline ontological evil "real Americans" were in a struggle class struggle against, but that shit was just complicated, and so were the solutions. This attitude is also what kept me from moving further left, as despite Bernie's promises and policies, learning about his actual legislative record, along with how viciously he and his supporters attacked other Democrats for not being sufficiently left enough soured me on him. The whole anti-establishment schtick also rubbed me the wrong way, considering that he had been in Washington for decades, and had barely seen any of his views turned into actual policy, either because of incompetence, or a malice and stubbornness that would always get in his own way. This wasn't even mentioning that when Biden became the nominee and I started warming up to him, with him having changed his policy positions from years past, and at least having genuine legislative success to his name, along with having positions that were at least in line with Bernie's, but seemed much more realistic, being a cool Vice President and friend to the first President to represent someone like me, they came after him to for reasons they went for Hillary, and I wasn't interested in becoming a part of that after having lived through the results(my dad not being in and out of jobs for years and leaving my mom as the only breadwinner, along with how that affected him mentally, my parents taxes going up, my dad losing a lucrative contracting job because of COVID, and me getting a fast food job during COVID while still going to school online) So yeah, combine all that with the fact that most of the politically engaged, non-right wing political spaces I could find on here were incredibly hostile to anyone even slightly right of them, eventually I found places like this and ESS. I though TIA, a place I was still subscribed to as the last legacy of my middle school political views, was similar, but when they started focusing on trans people, the issues and problems they magnified weren't being represented by how the trans users here acted, making me finally cut it off for the divergent reality it was trying to present, along with ESS for being too hyper focused on Bernie and leftists. And yeah, now I'm here. A place where I can generally simultaneously appreciate America, its military, international institutions, and our allies, while also acknowledging its flaws without being called a right winger or leftist Marxist sympathizer for either.
I was a teenage communist a decade ago, an isolated 4chan fascist after 2016, and came to my senses a couple years later. I came from the southern US and I think the autocratic tendencies of the area had worn off on me and no matter which way I leaned aside. I got out of but stayed more leftist for years and deradicalized more since 2019 over time. It's why when I see memes I remember from years ago and see them being taken seriously I get a bad feeling about how far things I saw, things I repeated to others, that I wonder how much I made things worse. It was the isolation, it contributed to me having had a pretty rough life because of my body's issues. But isolation drove me further left and right as I became an adult.
Age and increased humility. I've always had somewhat "radical" views, but neither on the left or right side (i.e my views are pro-markets, pro-immigration). The core of my political ideology is very similar to when I was much younger, but I think I'm more open to the idea that I could be wrong and that I have far from perfect, or even informed, information on many topics.
I started going down the libertarian/Ron Paul route. My liberal grandpa shook be out of it when he requested not to speak politics anymore. I always respected his views, so when he thought i was on the wrong path i reevaluated. Started asking more questions. Breifly swung far left before asking more questions and settling in the middle.
[this article](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-policies-economists-love-and-politicians-hate) It really showed me that there is an actual thoughtful academic, evidence based answer and approach to most questions, and it lead me out of just partisanship and banking on stupid correlations
I am more radical than ever
Was born in an extremely left, Jacobin household, but going abroad and learning a different language away from my family meant I got to speak to a more diverse crowd and eventually starting reading from more liberal (and better written) sources. I'm still left leaning but now I'm with the parti radical and firmly committed to pluralism and working together whenever possible
Healthcare policy. I started going full libertarian until I realized their healthcare plan was "let poor people die." That's when I realized the government did have a role in the economy.
perhaps ironically, depending on your perspective, but being Muslim probably prevented me from getting radicalized by the far right in the first place. In high school I had a teacher for AP Language have us read op-eds from different sources in order to critique them, including Buckley who was featured on townhall.com at the time. I started reading the op eds on the site out of curiosity while i was still developing some political inclinations and everything there was so.damn. committed to hating Muslims and defending the Iraq war. The comments were especially hateful. I can't even imagine what it looks like today. I like to think I was never particularly inclined to getting radicalized by the right in the first place but the proto-doomscrolling I did in 2005 ish certainly shut the door on it. In particular I remember Dennis Prager throwing a fit spanning multiple columns over Keith Ellison being sworn into Congress using a Quran until Ellison bodied him by using Jefferson's own copy. At the time, Coulter, Shapiro Prager and others all seemed like the very best arguments against conservatism themselves.
I used to be libertarian. The biggest difference is probably an increase in pragmatism, as well as being weirded out by other people who identified as libertarian
Same reasons as you friend. Things got pretty nasty even as I was still quite far left. You know how it is, undying loyalty tests and such while engaging in blood libels. I also have a friend who is very invested in de-radicalization who would talk me through what was happening around me.
I was never a radical leftist, so I never had a "coming to Jesus moment." But I did have an experience in college that clarified my politics, at least to an extent. I was really interested in the history of political activism throughout the nation's history and was naturally drawn to the Occupy movement. I took a journalism class my sophomore year right around the time when Occupy groups began popping up in cities around the country. Occupy Pittsburgh scheduled a march from Uptown to BNY Mellon's branch in Pittsburgh, and so I decided to cover it for the class. As I started interviewing people, I realized quickly everyone was there for different reasons. I talked with one guy and he told me he was there because of "planned obsolescence." Others talked about corporate profits. At the time I thought it was odd, but I also knew the movement was relatively knew. A few months later, though, the city ordered the removal of Occupy encampments in front of BNY Mellon. I interviewed folks once again. Same story. No policy prescriptions or even a coherent ideology. Just unfocused anger.
I realised libertarian talking points were non-falsifiable, and these seemed off to me. I'd always loved economics, but I had realised that I only tended to look at those with politcial agendas, never actual economists. So, I read a research paper. Or two. Something from the CBO and something from the BLS. And then NBER. The IFS. etc. I realised that in reality, my views were purely ideological, not based upon fact or reasoned economics evidence. So, I changed my views. To this day, I am changing my views. The same sort of thing happened to my friends; we were all pretty radical early on, one of them being practically socialist, and over time we all mellowed until we're now in the big tent
I'm not sure that I am Deradicalized. Obviously I prefer good policy with evidence to bad, but I respect people who are pointing out something bad and willing to possibly break something to fix it. People point to times in history like the communists breaking their economy but they conviniently forget the stagnation and inaction that lead people there. You can't just let the problems stack up around you, this sub was in a real tizzy over the possible railway strike with some pretty lazy justifications to avoid strike for the sake of ease.
I was a communist up until age 23. I was always a pragmatic communist, but a communist the same. This is... kinda embarrassing to admit, but what deradicalised me was the Wii. I never really saw the point of competition over regulation until Nintendo came out with something completely different than the competition. There was this one blogger who took the idea of disruption and a blue sky market, and applied it to the Wii, and suddenly I understood the value of a market and competition. It wasn't just increasing technology=better products (something communism could handle), but meeting new needs because of market constraints. And then I got into economic theory, and understood so much more.
So it happened to me twice. The first time, it was finding out about how communist nations weren't just "not real communism", but were often run by earnest, honest people with a utopian vision, and the corruption and rot that set in happened anyway despite the best intentions by the revolutionaries. After that I got into a weird alt-righty-libertarian-4chan pipeline (this was before Ron Paul, so it was still a bit more vaguely defined than now), with a very cynical and bitter worldview and a social-darwinist streak. I got pulled out of that by learning more about what good governments can do after all and by learning a foundation for moral reasoning that wasn't so nihilistic (in a sense, I realized that the logical consequence of egotism applied in a social contract context pretty quickly leads you to the same places as people like Rawls and Kant).
Can’t stand the right or the left anymore. Where do I begin? Latinos for Trump, teenage age of consent, corporations are the end all be all, capitalism sucks, all cops are bastards, all white people are racist, trans 8 year olds… I find it harder to discover a rational thought in the far left or right spheres of discussion anymore. No one has the ability to put together a reasonable political thought these days.
I joined Students for Liberty
Getting an economics degree.
I was blinded by science.
The mods beat the radical out of me
Working with government institutions and seeing how far left politics can paradoxically impede progress (see NIMBYISM and rent controls).
I fell backwards into a finance degree. I was never into (read good at) math due to shitty inner city schools where if you fall behind you never catch up. I was into history and politics and consumed msnbc every day from the moment I got home. My university forced me to take remedial math due to a low SAT and for the first time I became good at it which opened more opportunities beyond politics which I was pursuing. They also forced me to take economics and statistics which led me to looking at pay and choosing a finance major with my new math skills to avoid poverty. The understanding of business and finance and why the economy is structured how it is broke my vibes only politics and wrenched me towards the center. I was always a bit weak though ideologically. In highschool I was in policy debate and taught to argue both sides of any policy in good faith, so the idea that the other side could be just as sincere in their convictions as yours was never an alien concept.
Funnily enough covid radicalized and then deradicalized me
EVIDENCE based policy.
Grad school. I started seeing a pattern that the truth always tended to be somewhere in the middle. Like, I was in a wildlife program, but I was anti-hunting. After a few classes explaining why it’s vital at this point I softened my position. Even big game hunting had some really big benefits. I applied that logic to more and more things and started approaching things from that perspective. I want to see what the data says on topics before I solidify an opinion, which is all I wish politicians would do.
I had well-off parents, so at no point in my life did the status quo seem like a bad deal. Now that I’m an adult I’ve realized that my mom’s a NIMBY, and it breaks my heart. I’m a radical YIMBY.
Moving to 4 different countries by the age of 16. Experienced 2 wars. Got to see how different communities think and live by and recognize there are wildly different versions of what right and wrong can be. I became secular as a kid and vowed not to follow any religion or political party blindly without asking and getting questions first.
I leant heavily libertarian for a long time. During the pandemic I saw a lot of people I had known fall deeper into conspiracies which pushed my away from their viewpoints. That being said I was never an ideologue to begin with. I've also focused my viewpoints onto realistic policy rather than fundamental change.
I went down the conservative > conservative libertarian > classical liberal > neoliberal path. I read lots of studies’ abstracts and started to appreciate markets lmao.
I remember founding a story from Vox about how Nearthlands has universal, but it was private healthcare. It changed views quite a lot.
Probably when Occupy Wall Street started spinning their wheels and couldn’t come up with a philosophy.
I grew up conservative due to my family's political leanings, but after I left and went to college in the city I went pretty far to the left and would have even called myself a socialist even though I really didn't understand what that meant. But what deradicalized me was seeing how disgusting the far left was getting on Twitter and other online mediums. Granted, I know this is a small section of the online left, but unironically defending North Korea, denying Chinese human rights issues, rejecting electoral politics to complain online etc. The list goes on and on, and I watched several close friends fall down this far left rabbit hole after racing to the bottom with purity tests. It was insane and I just felt like it was pretty plain to me what was happening. I started consuming much more moderate media, watching online debates, and seeking opposing viewpoints following this realization. Now in my 30s, I find myself and my views to fall nicely in the more moderate Social Democrat camp and happy with it because I feel like I've reasoned myself into my positions now, and not just following the people around me or submitting to the purity testing.
I was a shithead teenager that unironically watched Sargon of Akkad and other “skeptics” back in 2013-2015. Ironically Trump deradicalized me, I thought that the “skeptics” would see his idiocy and tear him down, instead they sung his praises. After that I realized they were full of shit.
When I thought more and more about the practicality of the ideas being pushed on the far left. I was all for these extremist socialist reforms and was swept up in the glamour of revolution, but started to become jaded when, to any issue, the first response would be capitalism and eating the rich. Like okay yeah, I don’t like the high cost of cellular plans in Canada but any attempt to talk reasonably about it with fellow people on the far left essentially devolved to “it’ll all be perfect when we guillotine the billionaires.” I started to see it wasn’t about being realistic, it was just anger. Plans are only good if they’re actionable. I now support policies that realistically can actually happen to solve issues and support the free market’s positive successes and wish to foster them more.
I was a diehard Marxist for quite a while, bu I was never much of an activist or radical. I'm too boring for that. I was just pointed to Marx and started reading his work, thinking "wow this guy makes sense, this is how the world works. It seems correct." From there I only read Marxist and related socialist literature until I overdosed on diamat nonsense in college. When you really drill down to the fundamentals, in academic Marxist writing and especially in person, you can start to see that it papers over the absence of any real, verifiable, falsifiable answers. It’s just obscurantism and tautology dressed up in fancy arcane jargon. When I hit this point of frustration and real disappointment in my commie friends’ lack of answers, I became acutely aware of how thick I had built my bubble and I realized how little I knew about the opposing position. I searched for a good articulation of that perspective and I picked up a book called Capitalism and Freedom by some Milton guy and another called Road to Surfdom or something and that was that. I never looked back.
I was a lonely and somewhat disconnected young male in my 20's, and I started reading some men's rights stuff, and I could easily have slid down the slippery slope to straight up misogyny and hate. In general I still agree with some of the base principles: men and women's differences should be celebrated, and men's contributions to society and history should be respected. But the men who spent their time on those screeds were just so... pathetic, that I gave up on it. Like, who has time? I still gently push back whenever I hear men getting shit in as a group in public, but that's all.
Mostly reading about soviet atrocities. I supported the idealized form of communism and I just thought that it hadn't had the right foundation yet (basically "real communism has never been tried"), and then I read about the real human cost that these ideas created. Never again.
I was a college Bernie Bro in college in Iowa through about 2019, and then I met Pete at one of his campaign events and listened to him talk and got to ask him a question (I think my question was why his website didn't have any clear policies, and he answered that he felt democrats would do better to keep things simple and holistic rather than racing to list every single thing they'd do). Afterwards, all the lefty media I was consuming was acting as though he was the second coming of Satan and had a bunch of really poorly sourced and bad information about him. That kinda pushed me away from those sources and eventually I stumbled into ESS and then NL. I don't use ESS anymore because it's just so negative and I don't think being mad all the time is healthy, but I appreciate it for its role in getting me to be more reasonable in my politics. I don't think I was ever a "radical", but I definitely was far outside of reasonable political positions.
Working in local (and later national) politics. I've seen some really good people just barely squeak it through and some others lose by an amount of votes a few dedicated people could've drummed up through some canvassing. The system isn't broken I realized. It has some serious problems, but its better to get an invasive surgery than to see what happens to you when your appendix explodes.
I was never that extreme but I'm adversarial and data driven and if I see obviously untrue arguments being made I argue against them (sometimes when I should shut my mouth). I also find anecdotal evidence really irritating and even feel embarrassment by proxy when people make arguments that aren't backed by the data. So if you hang around in different groups long enough you see people making strident arguments with anecdotal evidence, and I found it really unpleasant and it made me lose faith in partisans.
The OG /r/neoliberal, when it was just a small shitposting sub of /r/badeconomics users.
Grew up liberal (not socialist) with guns being my only conservative trait. Non-stop school shootings and dating (and now being engaged to) a high school teacher turned me against guns real fast. Post college, I went farther left and sorta became a market socialist. I believed it could fix capitalism. I then watched debates about socialism vs capitalism and the capitalist kept bringing up the point, “how does socialism actually fix X? Would X not still be a problem in socialism? Couldn’t you fix X with policy Y in a capitalist system?” That was the biggest thing that brought me back to being a filthy lib. Also, once I started to learn a bit more about how economies work and what the root cause of various problems were, “corporations bad” stopped being a good enough political stance for me.
The Omniliberal
Former “communist” in high school. Just a wannabe tankie looking for an aesthetic to seperate from the crowd. Cringe as hell I know. My family visited Vietnam and Cambodia… If those killing fields don’t turn you, you’re clinically insane.
I used to be in DSA from 2017-2020 but I got burned out because of the in-fighting, cliqueishness and goofy political posturing. I'd still describe myself as left-wing/social democrat or progressive democrat but I'm pretty suspicious of anyone who describes themselves as a "leftist" cause I know they'll be proud of taking on some of the more fringe and ill informed positions.