I got bored of attack helicopter memes in mid 2014 and left /r/Tumblrinaction
I used to think TIA was funny, poking fun at the low-hanging fruit of spoiled suburbanite kids who have to dream up problems so they can feel edgy.
Then I realized it had become a right-wing echo chamber. Or maybe it was all along. I still can't tell.
Yeah, I got sucked into that for a while, before gradually noticing that a lot of the stuff they were laughing at ("headmates", "transethnic" people, etc.) seemed to be limited to a few extremely obscure Tumblr accounts instead of being widespread phenomena. A lot of communities that are based around dunking on people fall into the trap of focusing almost all of their attention on a tiny number of trolls and people with obscure personality disorders, but TIA fell for it really hard.
Also finally getting a little bit of exposure to sociology and philosophy made me a lot more open-minded about political and cultural movements. Even if there were a massive, influential community of Otherkin, it's hard to argue that it's any weirder or more threatening than, say, Christianity or car enthusiasts.
My tipping point was realizing that even those 'transethnic' weirdoes weren't hurting anyone, so why should I care?
TIA feels like another case of someone using "edgy humor" to draw people into alt-right talking points.
isn't this community based almost entirely around dunking on Charlie Kirk & Ben Shapeeno?
I mean, it's not limited to just them, but there's definitely a bit of an echo chamber here in terms of making out all opposition to be harmless clowns.
All opposition are clowns, but certainly not harmless - I think this community realizes that more than most.
This is why we buy guns! For the harmful clowns
we see in our night terrors
Not even close, no. Nor are those people fringe trolls, they have audiences.
I avoided indoctrination by being a complete thick headed, bucket minded, starch pressed, ding dong of a child. When I was young and the internet was new, I got really into conspiracy theories. Complete child mentality. Enough brain power to see that something is wack but not enough to think critically about the "Illuminati" angle and process what capital is and how it manifests in society. Complete 1D level thinking.
"Ruby Ridge, that's a yikes from me dawg. That's why we should vote for less government."
"Waco is why your mom should be a gun"
"Ted Kazinczy is why it takes 6-8 weeks to get anything from Lillian Vernon"
I would talk about conspiracy theories all the time and I remember there were people in my life that really wanted me to read "The Turner Diaries". They would tell me "If you really want to know whats going on your should really read this book". No lie, I thought that was the book that inspired the movie "Turner and Hooch" and would just smile and nod while thinking "Damn, Tom Hanks is cool and all but I don't know what that has to do with what I'm talking about my dude."
So when they asked if I read it I thought "yeah, I watched the movie that the same thing" and the radicalization process would always hit a dead end when they try to talk about the book and I kept thinking about scenes from a fucking buddy cop movie with a dog.
It also had the added side effect where for a while I associated white supremacist vibes with being a huge Tom Hanks fan.
How I avoided right wing indoctrination: the church told me as a child that gay marriage is immoral, so everything else they said immediately became suspect.
For me it started when the church told me people of other religions didn't go to heaven. I asked them "what if they're the ones who are right and we end up in hell for following a false god?", and only got a "lol we're right" as an answer. That day I stopped believing in anything the church and my catholic school said.
I was a libertarian for a short while, but then I realized I didn't hate everyone else so I started reading about marxism
I was a libertarian for a short while, but then I realized I didn’t hate everyone else so I started reading about marxism
Yeah, my libertarianism was mostly fueled by the corruption in mexico's government. It made believe business were a better solution to societal problems. Now I'm working on an article linking perception of government corruption with economic inequality. I truly believe that is big business' new approach to weaken regulations
That was one of the first contradictions for me. The "we're being persecuted!" narrative combined with the "They're trying to legalize gay marriage!" narrative.
How are Christians being persecuted if non-Christians are the ones living under Christian theocratic laws?
Also the story about Stalin giving kids candy definitely had the opposite effect on me.
another reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/1d76iw/do_you_want_some_candy/c9nlc1x/
The teacher asked the class who believed in God. I am a Catholic Christian, so I raised my hand. Most of my other classmates did as well. She sort of had this smirk on her face when she asked everyone to pray to God for anything they wanted – so of course you could hear all of the children, including myself, praying. We prayed for mostly bikes, toys and other innocent things a five year old would pray for.
After we were done with our prayers, the teacher asked us all to open our eyes and see if all the things we prayed for God to give us were there. Of course there was nothing there, just us. So the teacher asked us to close our eyes again and pray to Fidel Castro for a piece of chocolate candy. We all closed our eyes and asked for the candy.
At that moment I could see from the corner of my eyes as my head was down, the teacher had a bag with her, and was dropping a piece of what looked like candy on each of our tables. When she was finished she asked us all to open our eyes and see if Fidel Castro was generous to give us the candy we had prayed for. Most of the students cheered in laughter and glee at how great Fidel Castro was.
first link on google -> https://news.unclesamsmisguidedchildren.com/communist-indoctrination-exchanging-a-piece-of-candy-for-truth/
I don't remember this being about Cuba and Castro specifically, but when I was a kid this story was taught somewhere like it was a big deal.
Reading /pol/ degeneracy threads in early 2012 and realizing I was miserable and making it worse by immersing myself in that shit every day, so I started cutting back my 4chan use a good bit.
Then I got a student job a few months later with majority black coworkers and after six months or so quietly realized I was a racist with stupid brainworms that I couldn't believe any more.
Thank god I was too much of a weenie to go on 4chan it seemed scary over there
i didnt even realise attack helicopter memes meant anything until like 2018 lmao im glad im not more online
Every time I look back at r/tumblrinaction I wonder how much it's gotten worse vs how much I've gotten better. It sucks thinking I used to like that place.
edit: my worst fears are true
In its infancy, it had a few decent posts about people getting mad over nothing, but it took me embarrasingly long to notice it becoming a crusade against strawmen and/or harmless 13 year olds with a mix of transphobia
It was briefly (so, so briefly, I promise) helpful to me because I embarrassingly started my internet life in the White Lady "Feminism" Blogosphere, so I needed a dose of mockery to make me start questioning liberal ideology. But yeah, then I quickly wised up to the fact that it's pure fash pipeline poison
edit: also I got on Tumblr, met cool people and realized the le Tumblrina strawman was bullshit
It was started by people on one of the anti shitredditsays subs. Everyone who recovered from it has this idea of "oh it was fine when I fell into it, but it got worse after that" and it just isn't true.
There were a few moments right after it was made (like the first 12-18 months) where it wasn't that bad, though anyone on the left (which I wasn't at the time) could see where it was headed. It was making fun of otherkin (really no need to punch down, of course) and missing the irony of whatever the equivalent of "kill all white men" was back in 2014. It wasn't long at all before it fell off the cliff from "bad" to whatever it is now.
My best friend in highschool was a nazi, despite not even being white. I was going along with everything, justifying it as being just jokes and edgelord stuff and whatever. I was mostly interested in doing crimes and making jokes. I didn't actually believe any of the nazi stuff for most of that time, but I eventually did start believing The Bell Curve-type stuff, and only about black people.
Someone on a forum that I was on posted something about racism being unscientific, and that you're an idiot if you're racist. I did internet research and was like "holy shit, I'm an idiot for believing any of this. I have to stop being an idiot".
There were two other guys at school who seemed like they were just funny and edgy guys. Since I was always drawing comics during class, they asked me whether I could draw a picture of Hitler for the back of their zine. One of these guys wasn't white, so I again didn't take it seriously. They had also given me The Communist Manifesto to read earlier, so I didn't think that they were nazis. Before I'd finished drawing Hitler, though, I looked through the rest of their zine, and it was legit nazi stuff. I was super creeped out, but finished the Hitler drawing anyway because I felt a bit of pressure. Then I never talked to them again.
A little bit after that, I was at my friend's house, and we were trying to get rid of an animal that was in his garage. It wouldn't leave, so we poked it so much with broomsticks that it was bleeding out of its eye (even though we didn't poke it in the eye). It didn't really have anything to do with naziism, but it felt like it did, and could see where being friends with this guy was leading. I got freaked out and said "I'm going" and ran away to my house. I never talked to him again, even though he had been my best friend... Except for 2 years later, when I wanted to buy weed and he was the only one I knew who sold weed. He tried to get me to stay and hang out, but I made an excuse and actually never talked to him again.
After that, I defaulted to being a libertarian, not realizing that being right economically was racist too. I always had doubts about it, though, because my favourite teacher had made fun of my friend (a different friend) for reading The Fountainhead. It was easy for me to get out of libertarianism on my own and become a social democrat. I eventually got better after that, but that's the story of how I avoided right wing indoctrination.
I still kind of feel guilty about my time on that subr*ddit though. It definitely wasn't healthy for anyone.
I've been mostly left economically my adult life but I was almost duped for a while: even though I'm older I somewhat bought into the whole gamergate nonsense (though to be honest, I still don't understand what actually happened), SJWs being problematic, and the work place mentality that feminism is destroying the functionality of working men in modern society.
Almost.
At some point about 5 or 6 years ago, someone said, why does everyone hate SJWs? Who doesn't want social justice?
That forced me to rethink things. While I still believe that many of our social issues are rooted in bad economic policy, advocating for social justice can lay bare all of the problems social inadequacies touch. And people wanting fair and equal treatment isn't bad; in fact, it's never bad.
Anyhow, that's how I ended up almost thinking like a right wing dipshit in the modern age for a little while. I have to hand it to right wing propagandists: they know how to frame an argument. The lack of response from the Left in popular culture is shocking because being Left is fucking logical as it gets. But much like our elected body, there are only 2 trains of thought in the media: the right wing attack line and the limp-dick liberal all-sides-are-equal semi rebuke.
I was starting to get into "new atheism" when it was a thing. I started reading The End of Faith and just right off the bat had to go wait, it's all just shitting on muslims?
Thank God Atlas Shrugged was too damned boring for me to fully digest. Felt pretty sick though reading it without really knowing why
Ha, I actually had a copy randomly when I was younger, I don't even remember where I got it. I never read it.
Great for kindling, this is ramping up to being a cold winter
Very similar here, but it was because of the "she's criticizing capitalism on an iphone, what a hypocrite" idiocy that finally clued me in that I was in the wrong place.
