This isn't a joke either, they genuinely believe this.
In the words of my dad "you were predestined to care too much about basically everything"
Anyone else have similar family "explanations" for their leftist views?
This is a dumb post but I'm stuck in bed sick and feverish, I have to kill time somehow.
My mum is a self-avowed communist (though she's only read Das Kapital - but that's more than most of you libs) and she's said loads of times that that must be the source of my own leanings.
I think it had the effect of instilling the socialist ethic in me as a child - treat others as yourself etc. - but I feel largely that my politics emerged from study - I was always reading stuff as a kid: boring encyclopaedias, scifi novels, history books yadda yadda.
If anyone reads a sufficient amount, I reckon they asymptotically converge on historical materialism - actually then reading Marx and other theorists is what takes you the rest of the way over the threshold.
In college I became convinced that it's almost assured that if one does enough studying, eventually you have to confront Marxism unless you deliberately avoid it. The concepts and citations arise so frequently within history, literary studies, sociology, etc that even a cursory glance at them will at the very least skim the surface. So then you end up either confronting Marxism and finding it solidly irrefutable (or at the very least convincing enough to keep in mind), or you become like Jordan Peterson and confront the topic through a filter of right wing cranks
I always laugh at the "Marxist professors" line from conservatives. Had to take literary theory as a prereq and there was only the briefest, most facile discussion of interpreting via a Marxist lens. This was the semester after I had waited two hours in line to vote for Obama in 08 and was super stoked that he won. The quick disillusionment in Obama combined with some arguments with that professor got me thinking about leftist issues.
Biggest argument was when she said that the wizard/muggle thing was about race. When I suggested it was about class (Rowling was famously poor, wizards have all the power, basically have their own world, look down on non wizards, even people who make it in on their merits like Hermione aren't really accepted, etc, and also British books are always about class), it clearly had never occurred to her, and she just flatly dismissed it.
Tl;dr: arguing about Harry Potter put me on the path to leftist politics.
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