Granted it was during a bleak period of my life when I was so reactionary. But my god, to think these goobers are still around today, still doing racism and sexism, just moving from target to target to take out the impotent rage on.
Just reminded of it today with the “discourse” of Yasuke being in Ass Creed and G*mers changing any woman not white and waifish with AI.
At one point, I personally identified as an Anti-feminist. It was over a decade ago, of course, but it brings me great shame. I never considered myself conservative, I have genuine fascists in my family and never fully aligned with any of them, but I was a deeply reactionary liberal. I fell down that pipeline and nearly tumbled down the alt-right, but thankfully stopped at “classical liberalism.” Please, feel free to laugh at my former self, he was (and still is, albeit to a lesser extent) a supreme dumbass of the highest order of magnitude, and should be laughed at.
Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.
What I am trying to say, is that we are the sums of our trajectories. It’s the Dialectic at work! We contain within ourselves the next version. Politzer puts Dialectical Materialism very beautifully in Elementary Principles of Philosophy, and I truly believe it helped me shed my self-hatred for being so reactionary for so long, as it was a necessary step considering my own personal Material Conditions that led to the me of today.
I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future.
This was my trajectory too. I went through a lot of rehabs and psych ward visits for my alcoholism that radicalized me and allowed me the chance to meet people very different from myself.
I truly believe it’s the best path to deprogramming people. Exposure works. It’s easy to dehumanize others until you work and study alongside them, until they become just as human as you.
It’s also a major factor for anti-immigrant rhetoric and redlining, to keep that fascism festering.
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I tell myself this all the time. You should always be able to look back ten years and be like “what was I thinking??” It shows growth, and it shows you won’t ever stop working on yourself. Anyone born in the U.S. that has taken our path knows how much unlearning you have to do in life.
It’s funny to me how all the “anti-feminist/anti-SJW classical liberals” from that era have faded away, because even if those guys didn’t realize it, the whole anti-feminism/SJW thing was just a stepping stone towards fascism and now the real thing has overthrown it.
I guess it’s not really funny as much as it is terrifying, but it’s still kinda funny to me how irrelevant people like Thunderf00t and Amazing Atheist are now, because they were assholes.
Yep, in retrospect it’s pathetic.