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.
this was from a comment I left in a thread yesterday but I guess it works here
I said in a comment like a month ago that my family was a collection of insufferable bougie assholes. I meant that literally. Two of my close relatives were and might still be millionaires, the vast majority of their wealth earned from being ghouls for hire for corporations looking to crush any lawsuit filed against them. Not gonna name anything specific here cause I don’t wanna dox myself, but one of these involved a voice actor being fired for getting too old to voice a certain role. This actor sued, but guess what, here comes the corporate lawyers. No tactics are too dirty or underhanded for these people. They have zero empathy and are soulless ghouls. They fucking crushed that person. The only way these people could be any worse is if they were pinkertons. These people are the gears that grind any victim of capitalism that gets a little too uppity into a fine powder. The dinner table was a constant outpouring of the most ghoulish sentiment imaginable. Pure hatred and contempt for the working class. Fucking monsters, all of them.
Does money just turn off basic empathy? Ironically it was being surrounded by these bourgeois ghouls and future ghoul trust fund babies at an insufferable private school (hell on earth for me. Extreme social anxiety and having basic human decency is not a great combo at these kinds of places. one kid killed himself because of the cruel hyper competitive environment.) that radicalized me. In short, having basic human decency made me a class traitor.
The thought that I could’ve ended up as one of these soulless capitalist ghouls is frightening. I know basically every other kid at my school did (fucking entrepreneurs, self made with the help of a few hundred thousand from their parents.) Even 15 year old me could think “this is bullshit. These people are fucking monsters.” I guess I was the odd one out in that I didn’t have every ounce of empathy and humanity beaten out of me. The world is so fucking cruel.
tldr my family was a collection of bourgeois capitalist pigs (literally; my uncle was a factory owner and my parents were landlords) and I was a contrarian (because I was constantly surrounded by these people) so I kinda started off just to spite them, but unlike my relatives I'm not a horrible person so it became serious.
Also another relative of mine writes anti-China op-eds for a conservative rag. Shitty people all the way down.
If it makes you feel better mao and fidel were the sons of landlords
It does, I guess. Maybe this is like the children of Marxists being capitalist ghouls but the opposite.