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I’d like to think I was already a pinko commie before coming into contact with this thread but this thread drat sure cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had regarding liberalism, mainly from growing up exposed to US media 325 CE - the first Council of Nicaea is held, I guess they decided important stuff such as whether the body of Jesus was literally made of bread or somesuch
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Mar 24, 2019 15:40
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? Happened across a Bakunin pamphlet called "The Capitalist System", thought "wow this very basic intro to contemporary 19th century criticisms of capitalism sure seems to still apply to modern times!". Read more Bakunin/Kropotkin et al, then went anarchist for a bit before getting into Lenin and my Russian history degree and deciding he actually had a lot to offer. Now here I am, voting for Labour. As a rope supports a hanged man, I suppose.
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Mar 24, 2019 15:44
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Eararaldor posted:Imagine Chris Grayling as PM. Hunt back to Health JRM as Women & Equality Boris as Chancellor Chope as Leader of the House
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Mar 24, 2019 15:51
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Yeah I was also a borderline alt-right libertarian guy in my mid teens, gradually realised that the 'freedom' I believed in was a sham that couldn't be achieved under capitalism. Read some socialist theory and thankfully it resonated real hard and I abandoned all the sketchy bullshit. Seeing wealth and privilege and the sheer cynical entitlement of the elite up close really helped.
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Mar 24, 2019 15:59
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Was a full on Tory before I was introduced to Something Awful and this thread (thank you Kerbtree). I was/am poorly paid so when I could buy a flat I was pretty convinced that people who couldn't were lazy and feckless. I did a cih course as part of my job and was the only conservative in the room, everyone else worked in council housing and I worked with students. UKMT was an accident, I thought it was just a casual chat thread. Still pretty passive about it all but I liked Corbyn and paid 25 quid was my first political action as I had never bothered to vote and I'm mid thirties. E: my conservative I mean never voted or joined but mindset was lazy scroungers /bootstraps
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Mar 24, 2019 15:59
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I've decided that after spending the weekend with my in-laws, that the difference between working class and middle class is the use of serving dishes for dinner.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:00
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I was a vaguely liberal type in my teens, got interested in communism properly after I left school at 16, going from an interest in bad state socialism to more recently libertarian communism. I will not buy your trot newspaper
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Mar 24, 2019 16:02
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https://twitter.com/iggigg/status/1109793309730443266?s=19
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Mar 24, 2019 16:04
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So I have to spend the whole Sunday cleaning my house before wife and kid come back from oversea visit. I have turn it into a junk yard while wife is no home. Can you guys recommend any UK news podcast/youtube channel/online radio stream I can play in the background? I prefer depressing goon leaning ones.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:11
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I was always liberal/left but basically didn't think anything beyond neoliberalism (not that I had a word for it) was possible until 2015. I never though Corbyn would win the 2015 Labour leadership contest, but thought it was pretty interesting when he did. It wasn't until the Brexit vote, second leadership contest and Trump that I fully went down the leftist path, as clearly whatever had been in place before it was no longer working, and I needed to work out what the problem was and what the solution would be.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:11
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loving lol of course there's an AWL banner in the background tino posted:So I have to spend the whole Sunday cleaning my house before wife and kid come back from oversea visit. I have turn it into a junk yard while wife is no home. Can you guys recommend any UK news podcast/youtube channel/online radio stream I can play in the background? We Don't Talk About the Weather or TyskySour have got you sorted
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Mar 24, 2019 16:14
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? The biggest one was losing my first job due to the start of the credit crunch. I was 19, hadn't gone to uni. Had to suffer through the endless changes to the DWP before giving up in frustration, and joining agencies. Exploited the gently caress out of - the end point being working 13 day stretches 12 hours a day for just under two years. Did some cleaning work for a landlord and seeing the horrendous living conditions of poo poo like 8 families trying to make a life in a shared house with a room each. I've always been vaguely lefty (probably closer to a liberal when I was younger) - told that the Tories were bad, Thatcher was bad, etc, but with no real nuance of politics, or understanding how one policy or political choice creates a butterfly effect which can ripple out. And thinking that it'd be better if they put all their differences aside and worked together - not realising then that homogeny of the parties as they were then were the problem. (Things are fun to look at it retrospect). All of those, plus my own struggles with depression and identity and yadda yadda yadda, and seeing the actual effects of austerity under the government as conditions for others got worse and worse. It made me angry. Seeing the media do nothing but support the government in this, and using foreign workers, and muslims, and "benefit scroungers" as scapegoats - using the same arguments I'd noticed as a kid. IIRC, it was Thatcher's physical form finally crumbling that I got into this thread, learnt a load more about various topics, and been guided in ways to further educate myself about socialism, the failings of capitalism, its enablers, British History, politics, etc, and get more politcally active and aware. So, yeah, thanks for that, all.  tl;dr Me at 15: Yeah. Capitalism is okay. I guess  Me now: Must. Crush. Capitalism.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:15
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i’m surprised people aren’t mentioning the second iraq war more as a radicalizing experience
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Mar 24, 2019 16:18
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Add me to the list of people radicalised by this thread. I grew up a public school educated libertarian and ended up working running security for a whole collection of private banks in the west end and city (Coutts and the like). Started lurking the ukmt in LF when that was a thing, primarily to gather intel prior to the various protests around the end of the noughties (as I was younger and less obviously in league with big capital at the time I was often used semi-undercover to report on the various protests in order to provide a better security response). I stuck around and listened until I realised that actually the left wing had it right all along, and became a massive class traitor. My family now considers me to basically be Lenin.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:19
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MikeCrotch posted:loving lol of course there's an AWL banner in the background Thank you, queuing up now.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:21
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So apparently May's plan is now to hold indicative votes, wait for soft Brexit/second referendum to win, then bring back her deal for a third or fourth time offering Parliament a choice between that and the outcome of the indicative votes. gently caress's sake.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:22
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Camrath posted:Add me to the list of people radicalised by this thread. I grew up a public school educated libertarian and ended up working running security for a whole collection of private banks in the west end and city (Coutts and the like). Started lurking the ukmt in LF when that was a thing, primarily to gather intel prior to the various protests around the end of the noughties (as I was younger and less obviously in league with big capital at the time I was often used semi-undercover to report on the various protests in order to provide a better security response). jesus christ
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Mar 24, 2019 16:22
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This is why Remain will never win. Still framing a massive issue as a petty personal grievance where being slightly inconvenienced is more important than the massive death toll that even more austerity or a harshly controlled boarder will cause. Of course you can't admit that austerity kills people because that might make voting for the tories all those times reflect badly on you and we're already conceding the boarders argument to the people who cheer when people drown in the Mediterranean and want concentration camps along Fortress Europe to keep the refugees out.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:22
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? My dad was a miner from the Rhondda and he loving despised the tories and was a huge supporter of the unions. My mother isn't massively political but has a great belief in fairness. Her sister married a businessman who went on to become a millionaire, something she helped with, so she was well aware how wealth was made on the backs of others.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:23
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tino posted:So I have to spend the whole Sunday cleaning my house before wife and kid come back from oversea visit. I have turn it into a junk yard while wife is no home. Can you guys recommend any UK news podcast/youtube channel/online radio stream I can play in the background? The thread OP has a list of lefty/vaguely lefty podcasts Guavanaut posted:High School Cadets-March For youtube there's Hbomb and Shaun. bump_fn posted:i’m surprised people aren’t mentioning the second iraq war more as a radicalizing experience Personally, it was a factor in retrospect - it made me see Blair was trash - but it hadn't fully ripped the veil off - technically my first political activity, but I was reacting to it the way FBPErs do to Brexit; this is a single bad issue that's got to stop, but with no thought about stopping the systems around it (or Blair), and no understanding or context of the history of us destabilizing poo poo in the Middle East for our own gain.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:27
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WDATW is great, novara is bad but james butler is good and chapo is great but anything claiming or described as the uk chapo equivalent is awful
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Mar 24, 2019 16:32
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? As a teenager I was deeply convinced that the world was just fundamentally hosed up, but because that was during the wild west days of the internet, I fell in with the objectivist/libertarian crowd, which caused me to misidentify the problem as government interference. I started to get disillusioned with libertarianism as I noticed how many libertarians seemed vehemently anti-union, when my understanding of libertarian principles led me to the conclusion that unionisation and union-only hiring agreements were a pure expression of self-interest on the part of workers. I realised that a huge swathe of the libertarian crowd actually don't give a poo poo about personal freedom and the rights of the individual if they're used by the wrong people, so I drifted back towards the centre a bit, wondering if maybe liberalism could actually achieve a better world. It kinda seemed like that was possible, for a while? So I voted Lib Dem in the 2010 general election. And then, y'know, that happened. Around the same time I read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine at the insistence of my mum, and Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right at the recommendation of this thread, which together sent me full socialist.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:33
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NotJustANumber99 posted:I guess I didnt think how that glib response would be taken so i apologise. I've been posting in the discord which is mush more punchy so yeah quite bad. Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? BTW on the off chance that there are any other left-wing scifi nerds reading this thread, one of the guys from Chapo Trap House did a pretty interesting interview with very lefty scifi author Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm not really a CTH fan in general but I am a KSR fan and this is a guest spot on another podcast (The Antifada), it's good. https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/bonus-will-interviews-kim-stanley-robinson-with-the-antifada e: brian posted:WDATW is great, novara is bad but james butler is good and chapo is great but anything claiming or described as the uk chapo equivalent is awful big scary monsters fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Mar 24, 2019 |
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Mar 24, 2019 16:34
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So what bets on by the end of the week we find out this Lidlington is an enormous sex pest.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:34
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? If you'd got me on Kids Say The Darndest Things and asked me what a government does it'd probably be "racism and reading people's private stuff". Looking at Her Majesty's Great British Government in tyool 2019 I'm still not sure that's too far off. Follow that up with my grandad (Old Labour trade unionist type) going on about the government was sodding useless in the early-mid 90s (narrator: they were) and me thinking that Tony Blair had the mannerisms of a psychopath (narrator: he was) and I spent most of that time in a "they're all the same and should gently caress off" state that leads to apoliticalness and pot smoking. Fortunately Spiked and Reddit didn't exist then, and the main streams of anti-government sentiment online were either Turner Diaries reading militia weirdos claiming that "actually apartheid enriched the blacks, look at these [authoritarian government produced, lol] education statistics" and the open source movement, and I got involved in the one that (while often full of STEMlords and blind to its own biases) wasn't completely loving terrible. This was also going into the time that South Park was full "both sides wrong" but also when soft-libertarians actually talked about SWAT teams and police militarization and violence rather than being a shirtless man screaming at a driving licence. The anti-government of punks and journalists both criticizing Bush and Blair rather than the anti-government of grown men wearing teabags and saying that Obama would ban being white. Which in turn got me into Open Source Ecology, the Global Village Construction Set, and the idea that we could all live a lot better without hierarchies if we only had the right tools and worked together, which is basically Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread without me knowing it, I was still short on theory other than things like God and The State, but at least that allowed me to speedrun through collective action and land reform without ending up on Reddit defending Hitler or pederasty or whatever. I also credit being out of work for a time in the shockwave after the Financial Crash, which was also around the time that the press and government were going mad about mephedrone causing you to eat your own balls, which was good for a laugh in TCC, which then got me reading the  American prison threads in LF, which really was ground zero for internet dirtbag left radicalization in the late 00s.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:35
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crispix posted:So what bets on by the end of the week we find out this Lidlington is an enormous sex pest. don’t we already know he’s a tory
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Mar 24, 2019 16:35
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brian posted:WDATW is great, novara is bad but james butler is good and chapo is great but anything claiming or described as the uk chapo equivalent is awful Michael Walker & Ash Sarkar are also good. It's basically just Aaron Bastani who's poo poo. The Bastani Factor is totally loving unwatchable.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:36
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bump_fn posted:i’m surprised people aren’t mentioning the second iraq war more as a radicalizing experience I was 13 when it started, and as a wean I'd grown up with constant coverage of the first gulf war, Kosovo, Bosnia, and the troubles. As far as I knew at the time, war was normal and forever 
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Mar 24, 2019 16:36
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who’s the uk matt christman
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Mar 24, 2019 16:36
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bump_fn posted:don’t we already know he’s a tory Yeah but, you know officially. I mean loving look at him.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:38
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MikeCrotch posted:Michael Walker & Ash Sarkar are also good. It's basically just Aaron Bastani who's poo poo. The Bastani Factor is totally loving unwatchable. Michael Walker is my chief problem with Novara and the position those three all took on Chris Williamson will be remembered by the actual left for decades edit: they're also buddy buddy with matt zarbs, noted Tom Watson defender to the point where he smeared other leftists as crazy for calling him out on it
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Mar 24, 2019 16:38
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bump_fn posted:who’s the uk matt christman I don't know, who is the non uk matt christmas?
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Mar 24, 2019 16:38
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the actual left
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Mar 24, 2019 16:38
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I was 5 years old when the iraq war started and when I grew up it was basically an accepted fact that our goverment lies to us to steal oil from other countries.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:39
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brian posted:Michael Walker is my chief problem with Novara and the position those three all took on Chris Williamson will be remembered by the actual left for decades What
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Mar 24, 2019 16:40
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babies itt
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Mar 24, 2019 16:40
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bump_fn posted:the actual left i've already posted like a thousand posts on why this is the case, yes it's a dramatic way to say it but then again intentionally throwing a comrade under the bus for reasons you know to be faulty should be a thing you get politically exiled for
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Mar 24, 2019 16:42
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? I'm another one radicalised by the thread. From a vaguely lefty/liberial upbringing, I always bumbled around as calling myself a "lefty-liberial" type without actually looking any deeper in to, always complainned about "so much infighting on the left", liked The West Wing, voted Lib Dem in 2010, all that horrible poo poo. It was reading this thread and listening to to people hear and listening to the people they listen to that did it. With the the 2017 elction as the final tipping point and well, paid up Labour member and total hard left thug now. And to think I only stumbled in to this thread (never used to venture in to D&D at all) because I used to half skim the another UK thread (GBS maybe, I don't really remember) that comaplined about how poo poo this thread is, good times. I'm a less lovely person because of all of you. Thanks goons.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:43
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Hey that was something I meant to ask. How did y'all get into leftist thought? My parents were hippies and I grew up in Northumberland, so hating tories was a given. I always thought that a lot of right wing economics didn't make any sense - how can it be possible for a government not to afford things, when things just require resources plus labour, for example. It seemed obvious that some sort of cooperative economics would work better for almost everyone, although I didn't know enough to say what that might look like. I still don't feel like I have a very solid grounding in theory, but I'm definitely going to read Capital one of these days... I did find out recently that my uncle was in Militant, so that was fun. Actually I've been meaning to check with the thread's leftist history experts - is the Socialist Party one of the OK ones, or do I need to have a discussion about some comrade delta equivalent? I'm not going to read his trot paper either way.
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Mar 24, 2019 16:43
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brian posted:i've already posted like a thousand posts on why this is the case, yes it's a dramatic way to say it but then again intentionally throwing a comrade under the bus for reasons you know to be faulty should be a thing you get politically exiled for i don’t actually know what any of that was about i was just having a laff
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Mar 24, 2019 16:46
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