He got me to read the Manifesto and would have hours' long debates with our social-democratic roommate and now this. It's really shaking me up a bit.
He is on the whole defeatist 'nothing will fundamentally shake the imperial machine so might as well pick the wardog with better domestic policies' tip. I want to get through to him but I am getting stuck.
For example:
i also refuse to not vote my conscience but i figured this time its not like doing this abstract process to pick if id prefer -100 points vs -200 points is gonna matter that much if i genuinely believe itll even be slightly better under kamala i might as well
The friend who radicalized me is now a fascist-adjacent EU liberal.
It's depressing as fuck and I honestly don't know why, but at some point it's like he just decided to become a bad person. He was a communist when he was like 14, got me into it, then when he was like 17 he became a piece of shit. Insanely misogynistic, would only talk to women he wanted to have sex with, and just incredibly rude to people he didn't know, even when they were nice people.
Now he's moved to the Netherlands to study EU politics or something, and all I know about him comes from his Instagram posts. He posts ableist shit all the time, he's in love with the EU and he just posted a Ukrainian fascist badge which he owns.
I remember sitting in a park with him when we had just finished school, telling him that I was going to join an ML org. He snorted and called them larpers, to which I pointed out that he didn't do any political activity at all, and I'd rather larpers than nothing. He thought because he read Lacan and smoked weed and was cynical that he was above politics.
It's so depressing. He used to be genuinely empathetic. He was a feminist when every boy his age was sexist, he would always tell people of the evil shit the US does, he genuinely got angry at capitalism. Now he's just a sack of shit
It's because nobody is anything at 14. It's quite literally politics as aesthetic. Literally never trust teenagers to be consistently principled on anything going into the future, because those principles are purely ideal.