The rosy maple moth! 🥰

LOOK AT HOW CUTE

Wait so that's why I've still been tanning a bit while wearing sunscreen? I just assumed a bit of tanning was unavoidable. I'll have to check for zinc oxide in the ingredients.

Lmao I got so confused by this post I was like wait I have a cat.... Am I the baddie? 🥺

It was very incremental overtime starting from high school. American education puts you in conservatorism by default just from the backwards history textbook narrative (and being white and middle class and never having had food insecurity etc). Then we had this Contemporary Issues course where the teacher literally drew a line on the board with Liberal on the left and Conservative on the right (lol). I decided: I like the liberal one. That's what I am!

Starting in college I was seeing lots of political posts on social media like Tumblr that taught me about things like intersectionality and such. That and having taken courses like gender studies, and world history which was still quite lib but it was slightly better than my childhood which said "we are amazing and magically bring freedom to everybody."

Eventually I realized our entire economic system, capitalism, is the problem. Bernie Sanders got people talking about "socialism" so I was exposed to some of it. But here is where I got stalled for a while. Socdems and anarchists had good takes about why capitalism is bad but always warned against evil "authoritarian tankies". I did not realize how programmed I was still, because even when I encountered one of these so called "tankies" it all just looked like propaganda to me. Citing Chinese media outlets etc, well of course they would lie, that's all they do. But the BBC and AP say the opposite and we have freedom of press and it's illegal for them to lie. So who is telling the truth? I was much less inclined to sink in these alternative takes about history and geopolitics, because of alt-right fake news that made me highly critical and suspicious of anything that wasn't "official" and the "world" had a consensus on. It's funny how the Nazi culture war stuff really distracted me...

But ultimately I ended up in this spiral of despair where I was like "capitalism must be destroyed. But anarchist attempts are always instantly squashed and communism turns into evil dictatorships. But it must be destroyed. But alternatives don't work. But it must be destroyed. But we can't. But we have to. But we can't. But we must. But we can't. Must. Can't. Must. Can't." This contradiction is what made me just say "fuck it, I'll hear what they have to say" lurk on lemmy grad and I was pretty much instantly convinced. To sum it up,

1. I ultimately still trusted institutions and "common sense" takes on history and the world. This needed to be destroyed first. Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People's History of the United States got me started on this. You really have to get to a point where it's like, wow, I have been lied to about literally everything ever.

2. Deprogramming the red scare BS. even with #1 complete, it just leads you to radlib stuff like "okay everything is terrible but.... China bad etc". Reading all the debunking stuff helped. But I never would have given it the time of day without #1 being complete because I would have instantly dismissed it as state propaganda.

3. Get rid of hangups about "authority". Reading On Authority helped. Dictatorship of the proletariat sounds scary and sus to a liberal, it sounds like some kind of slippery slope. But we literally live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie right here, right now. If instead it was a dictatorship for people like us, it would be so much better. Authority and freedom is ultimately subjective. Freedom to do what? Do I really want rich people to have a say? Nope!

Sorry it got so long, and there's so much more, like how I didn't even know what imperialism meant for a while. Maybe it will help others to get inside libs heads and convince them. Ultimately I was always a communist at heart - I always wanted equal rights and needs met for people. I just needed to find it. Maybe I'll make this its own post later.

Hello comrades, just joined :)

Always been "left" but there were sooooo many lies about "tankies" that it took me forever to get to this point 🤦‍♀️

I'm quite embarrassed that for so long I thought I had radical beliefs but in effect was just another lib.

Also having an existential crisis at the moment from realizing the evil empire that I'm a part of and that I can't personally do much about it in rural-white-land and I think I might actually not be able to even work at a job 😱😭 I'm not even a good marxist