I never get tired of 'em. I know we've discussed this before. I know the process is ongoing, not necessarily based on a single event, and depends a lot on your position in society. If discussing the radicalization of others, don't mention any methods unless people specifically told you that certain things radicalized them.
For me, I was a left-liberal for most of my life. Long story short, I ran in a state senate election trying to be as friendly to everyone as possible. The one thing I really wouldn't budge on was universal health care, since I knew from experience that it worked. I lost my election BADLY to a guy who ran on no platform at all, although he had much better name recognition. I worked so hard on that campaign and really was devastated and had to look for answers. Stupid as it sounds, at around that time I found the r/chapotraphouse subreddit and started listening to the podcast. That led to me listening to much better podcasts (like Revleft Radio), reading actual theory, and giving up on the Chapo podcast entirely once Bernie lost the last primary.
I'm always trying to radicalize others but I just usually get nowhere. George Floyd's death plus coronavirus I think resulted in a lot of people reconsidering things, but it seems like many of them have kind of swung back in the other direction now, at least as far as I can tell from watching my friends on Facebook. I've been arguing with my lib dad for months about all of this shit, with the result that he has actually gotten much better at deflecting Marxist points than the average lib lol. Sometimes I can get him to admit that everything is fucked and that Marxism is the only answer, at other times he'll say that we need to make friends with local business owners (some of the worst fucking people in the universe) and not alienate them.
Anyway, if you feel like writing your radicalization story or the radicalization stories of others, I'm happy to read.
Started in the 2000s, started seeing the light around 2014 or so
I'm an INTP internet shutin, so my main foray with the right was in race realism and anthropology.
Uncritically accepted what was being said because there were studies that ostensibly backed some of it up. Meanwhile, the left basically poo-poo'd any discussion of this stuff whatsoever. So my impression was that the left was "afraid of truth" or w/e
However, I began to notice that some of the things that I discovered made the right really angry or were heavily downvoted, despite the fact that I cited sources, data etc.
Also noticed that certain avenues of thought were strictly forbidden (IE: the effect that environmental factors can have, for example on a trait like height, among others)
Eventually I put 2 and 2 together and realized everything they say was just a cope for white insecurity/idpol. Now I'm a leftist with an extravagantly broad knowledge about the anthropology which is still verboten in liberal circles. But w/e.
I still maintain that if the left had a widespread interest in it, anthropology and "race realism" could be used as a force to combat white identity politics. If you know anything at all about the subject (rather than the propaganda the right puts out) it's really the logical conclusion of it.
If you’re interested in sharing some sources I’d like to take a look.
I can't give you a really good source because there is basically no source that explains this stuff at a basic level accessible to laymen. The ones that do (pop science rags) omit key facts or spin stuff in order to appeal to European bias.
For example, every time a thing gets found in Europe, there's a new "HUMANS MIGHT HAVE ORIGINATED IN EUROPE" headline, because the hordes of chuds want to see the African origin of Homo sapiens denounced. So the popsci rags tacitly spin things in order to get more chud views.
I've been thinking about making a website or youtube channel or something along those lines, but there's a problem.
The problem is that I would be pointing out a lot of eurocentrism/eurocope, which turns off white people in general.
But at the same time, I would be talking about genes, anthropology, ancestry as a genetic construct, and I think that turns off leftists in general. So effectively my material would cockblock me from my two main audiences
Do it anyway
Gotta retake the domain somehow, you're the man for the job
Yeah, I've been working on my video editing skills. I know that I have to be the change I wish to see in this world.
I meant it as a problem that must be overcome, didn't mean to sound defeatist and say that I'm explicitly not doing it because of that.
So to look at this a bit more closely:
It seems like as long as you very clearly delineate the original intent of race science--and point out the certain figures like Charles Darwin and Franz Boas, the gods of their fields, were anti-racist, you'll make headway. Further, if you point out the flaws of popular ideas of race science and re-establish it as something more factual and more 'neutral,' you'll get through to them.
Liberals love science as an aesthetic already. You're halfway there.
Charles Darwin wasn't an anti-racist though, unless I'm severly mistaking something. I remember many explicitly racist passages from darwin
I do believe that a minority of the work done by race "scientists" of the 1800s-1900s may have been legitimate, but it's very hard to tell which those are. Additionally, even if the work was unbiased a huge deal of it is confounded by environmentally changeable variables (for instance just getting proper food causes North Koreans to shoot up from 5'4" to 5'9" in just two generations--even though there's still a huge lack of calcium even in the South Korean diet)
Not anti-racist, you're right--I was thinking anti-slavery. But you get the idea.
It doesn’t turn me off at all. I find it all fascinating. Have you heard of Richard Lewontin or Christopher Caudwell? They both have a lot to say about this.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chao_Ning4/publication/334706747/figure/fig2/AS:784900378607616@1564146241938/PCA-and-ADMIXTURE-Analysis-for-Shirenzigou-Samples-We-projected-the-ancient-data-in-this.png
Comparison of ancient and modern DNA. Each color is a genetically distinct group. (Of course, genetic variation is a spectrum gradient--but at the same time there were localized periods of stark isolation and small population size which formed highly distinct gene patterns, which we know as "ancestry")
Notice that the geographically peripheral peoples (Nganassan Siberians, or Atayal Taiwanese Indigenous) have solid colors, meaning they have comparatively "purer" genes, aka less recent mixing.
Meanwhile the larger and interior populations (Han, French, Mongol) have multiple colors, meaning recently mixed ancestries.
Some of these are ancient samples, and come up as mostly solid colors.
WHG = "Western Hunter Gatherer", from France 9000 years ago. Solid yellow.
Anatolia_N = "Anatolia Neolithic", farmers from Anatolia 8000 years ago. Solid green.
"French" are a mix of yellow and green--meaning they are a mix of indigenous Western Hunter Gatherers, and Anatolian farmers. Functionally, this means that French people are half Middle Eastern, and half European.
funny my anthro class absolutely trashed any sort of it as unscientific lmao
well it depends which part
for example, it's undebatable fact that many people in Europe share maternal and/or paternal markers with people in Botswana or Japan or w/e. (True for any region not just europe)
Also, the current "European race" was only formed after a violent bronze age conquest and mass mixing from the east, with a complete replacement of paternal ancestry in a literal Columbus-American style takeover
These and other facts could easily be used to show the inherent mixedness of various peoples (especially Europeans). Instead we get shitty fash-adjacent tests from ancestry.com that support the current propaganda paradigm.
This bronze age conquest you speak of, would that be the "Indo-European" migration?
Right, or at least "Yamnaya" migration, since we have no evidence of what language they spoke (but a whole shitton of genetic evidence shows a tight association between the two)
this migration, and the discovery of these fossils were so central to European racial politics it's hard to overemphasize it
For instance, the redefinition of the word Caucasian? It literally means "of the Caucasus", so why did it get redefined to mean Europeans? Well, COINCIDENTALLY, these Yamnaya (formerly called Pit Grave) fossils were found shortly before this change took place--and they were found right by the Caucasus.
So it was likely a cope, similar to how Know-Nothings (basically Trumpers of the 1800s) called white anglos "Native Americans". Or how the viking meme COINCIDENTALLY only took off 2 years after Sweden lost Finland in the Finnish War. They wanted to connect Europe to the Caucasus, because it was already known that these "Indoeuropeans" originated much of Europe's culture, and we can't have foreigners originating our culture--something like that.
Then there's the appropriated word "Aryan", and the equally appropriated swastika, which was such a huge cope that it literally made 60 million europeans kill each other.
As well as endless LARPing of anglo-germanics as "nordic Aryans", which continues today even though the pigmentation genes of these Yamnaya have been confirmed to be in frequencies that are seen in modern Pakistan/Northern India--in other words they were Brown.
ok sure my issue is when people extrapolate that stuff to mean anything. They try to essentialize mass groups of people using traits that aren’t connected to certain outcomes. you cant look at someones jaw line and go ah thats a X race group they are more athletic or more intelligent.
sure they may identify gene groups now the question is for practical use does that relate to the social construct of race and do either have impact. in my studies it was unanimously no. most anthropologists say racial identifiers aren’t indicative of alot of these abstract implications of say disposition or intelligence, and that culture often has far more to play than the construct of race on physical performance etc.
i just wanna add on that im not dismissing the nature’s impact but they aren’t linked to race, there is more diversity in genetic variation within cultures than between them
A big part of eurocentrism is that europeans are studied 10000x more than anybody else.
You probably believe some racist anthro myths yourself. For example, I'd bet that 90% of this website believes that Europeans are uniquely lactose tolerant.
But the reality is that there are plenty of other ethnoracial groups that are highly lactose tolerant--they just have different genes that code for the same thing (Indians/Pakistanis, Arabs, Tibetans, Tutsi/Fulani/Tuareg/Nuba/Hadza/plenty of others across Africa). And moreover, Eastern/Southern Europeans have low rates. Again, the myth still persists
So what ends up happening is people say "Europeans are more X" where they looked for the genes for X extensively in Euros, but not in other groups.
And of course individual people can be anything for most traits, these are just tendencies