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I've always avoided having opinions
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Jun 3, 2016 10:58
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I got into Ayn Rand in a big way my senior year of high school. Then, in my first semester of college, I did a research project about her and I found out how much of a hypocrite she was. Then began my descent into the left.
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Jun 3, 2016 13:46
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In 8th grade I thought that the idea of instituting a benevolent neo-colonialism sort of program where big, rich countries would take over small, poor, dysfunctional countries and fix them up would be good for everyone. I put it down to knowing nothing about colonialism or Vietnam, and just enough about WWII to be dangerous.
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Jun 3, 2016 14:43
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System Metternich posted:I think he's saying that there's either a global revolution or none at all that's some utopian poo poo
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Jun 3, 2016 16:17
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Zeroisanumber posted:In 8th grade I thought that the idea of instituting a benevolent neo-colonialism sort of program where big, rich countries would take over small, poor, dysfunctional countries and fix them up would be good for everyone. I put it down to knowing nothing about colonialism or Vietnam, and just enough about WWII to be dangerous. Well, you were in the same position as the entire US military and state departments in 1955! One common flaw to many young people's ideologies is that they are overly rational. Because young people are thinking with clearly defined abstract "ideas" for the first time, they tend to think those ideas will solve everything.
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Jun 3, 2016 17:04
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I was in fifth grade for the Reagan vs Mondale election and I rooted for Reagan because Walter Mondale chose a woman as his running mate and I thought girls were yucky. 
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Jun 3, 2016 18:09
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forkboy84 posted:I was never a massively extreme atheist, but I definitely got caught up in the whole Dawkins/Hitchens wave of new atheism, of evangelical atheism, which was probably really boring for other people but I didn't really get into the Islamophobic elements of it, Islam never really seemed any more or less bad that other religions. I'm still an atheist but I'm much less interested in telling other people. I was mostly the same, though I don't remember "new atheism" really being a term back then. I was in my college's "Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers" club (2004-2008), which I ended up somehow becoming President of even after I mostly lost interest in it after the first year or so (because I had stopped caring about being atheist). To be fair, the club was pretty good and all the regular members weren't stereotypical "reddit atheists." We did get these two extremely obnoxious guys who both wore thick-rimmed black glasses and would constantly try and say edgy stuff and move conversations towards controversial topics, and we ended up having to kick them out.
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Jun 3, 2016 18:10
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Anti-consumerism is easy when you don't have any money, but it's an evolutionary dead end at the philosophical level. I still appreciate having gone through it, since the ability to resist some degree of consumer-based advertising is helpful in eliminating some superfluity, but it's still really reactionary without a clear answer to various questions it poses. I wouldn't even say I got into it for a rational reason; I knew my interest in it was completely irrational, and that surprised me. I wanted to figure it out in order to give it a rational basis. Sadly, more I read the more things stayed the same. I finally was able to track down an archive of the then-mythical Adbusters, and even though I liked what I was reading, I also noticed that basically none of it had sources, citations, or even supporting references. It was just making self-justified claims without proof. Soon after, I just gave up trying to make it work. It's like a dumping ground of misidentified problems. I have no doubt that those who consider themselves anti-consumerist do have legitimate grievances about something, and those problems may indeed have a surface element in the superficial appearance of commercial society. Sadly, because it is only the appearance of the problem they're reacting to, any attempts at actually dealing with it just never seems to go anywhere. Morroque fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 18:17
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oh yeah haha adbusters. i remember i was real into adbusters in high school, until i realized i was buying it in a store
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Jun 3, 2016 18:28
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Anti-feminism wimmen have the vote and equal pay what more do those harpies want I've since learnt better of course but I used to be a poo poo
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Jun 3, 2016 18:56
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I was a member of an anti-feminist Livejournal for a long while because I believed the word "feminism" should be "humanism" or some bullshit. That and an older woman used me and screwed with my brain, therefore all women are like that.  I remember seriously being afraid when it turned out a philosopher professor had an Andrea Dworkin book on her shelf. I was afraid she was going to fail me out of college because she clearly hated men (I'm not sure I understand where my brain was going, either).I realized I was being stupid after I realized that I really only had a problem with one person, and was acting like a scared idiot who didn't know how to handle bad experiences. I also called myself a "libertarian socialist" for a time because apparently I didn't know what words meant.
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Jun 3, 2016 19:29
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Morroque posted:Anti-consumerism is easy when you don't have any money, but it's an evolutionary dead end at the philosophical level. I still appreciate having gone through it, since the ability to resist some degree of consumer-based advertising is helpful in eliminating some superfluity, but it's still really reactionary without a clear answer to various questions it poses. I wouldn't even say I got into it for a rational reason; I knew my interest in it was completely irrational, and that surprised me. I wanted to figure it out in order to give it a rational basis. Sadly, more I read the more things stayed the same. I finally was able to track down an archive of the then-mythical Adbusters, and even though I liked what I was reading, I also noticed that basically none of it had sources, citations, or even supporting references. It was just making self-justified claims without proof. Soon after, I just gave up trying to make it work. Anti-consumerism is an interesting example of how my own development kind of occurred at the same time as the development of the pop culture around me. In about 1992, I am turning 13, and pretty naive of the world. But the rest of the world is still naive: despite Nirvana being on the rise, most of the pop culture is still really light and pop. Then, just as I enter puberty, the pop culture gets much more socially and politically aware and confrontational. The birth of "alternative" culture. And then, just as I enter my mid-teens, the confrontational alternative culture kind of gave way to a more twee alternative culture. Its how we got from, say, Nirvana to No Doubt. And along with that, a lot of political and social commentary starts focusing not on confrontational politics, but on deconstructing social messages, looking at how consumerism and social expectations effect society. And Ad-busters is part of that. But at the same time as that is happening, that just feeds back into a type of consumerism. Because a big part of Adbusters is "I am too cool for mainstream culture", which is the exact same attitude that advertisers are going for. So that is kind of part of the fall of the 1990s, the switch from being confrontational to being cool.
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Jun 3, 2016 20:51
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glowing-fish posted:But at the same time as that is happening, that just feeds back into a type of consumerism. Because a big part of Adbusters is "I am too cool for mainstream culture", which is the exact same attitude that advertisers are going for. So that is kind of part of the fall of the 1990s, the switch from being confrontational to being cool. Pretty much this. By the time I arrived two decades later, it was very clear that something had happened to it which a majority stake in anti-consumerism did not actually want but was unable to stop. Thus begot the hodgepodge. It was a little bit of environmentalism, a little bit of literary criticism, a little bit of feminism, a little bit of political leftism -- but each only in such trace amounts that it couldn't respond to anything with workable solutions. It might be odd to say I hated because it wasn't ideological enough, but because it was so ineffective that none of what it did could end up sticking or even functioning as intended. After Adbusters essentially created Occupy Wall Street, the editors would later go on write about how protest movements are actually sort of useless and don't work at all; their new thesis being that protest movements are only successful whenever mainstream or hegemonic interests allow for it to succeed. What countries did well during the Arab Spring was the experiment that proved this, with perfectly delineated control groups and everything. So if that's out of the question, now what? Oddly, they seemed perfectly aware that they were feeding back into consumer mainstream-ism, but they didn't really have an answer for what to do about it. Everyone knew that when Naomi Klein's anti-business No Logo somehow got awarded the "National Business Book Award", it was very clear something had Gone Wrong™. The only writer I was able to find who could accurately describe what happened was Anne Elizabeth Moore in 2008, defining the process through which corporate co-opting of authentic art takes place. In a way, it's almost like a non-political version of regulatory capture, when regulators/politicians who regulate/legislate on corporate power often end up working for the same corporations after their public tenure is over. It's a similar process for artists as well. Even still, the only alternative she could muster was to re-invent punk again, but this time only more acerbic. The problem is, I sort-of remember why I was so attracted to anti-consumerism. It was a combination of things, but a major one was the shift away from the top-down broadcast age with all the anonymous sources of media telling you what you are and what you like (even when they're wrong) to the more open Internet age. It was harshest when I was fully into Internet stuff, but everyday life for a majority of people was still in broadcast-only mode, making mainstream culture feel like a hostile environment that wanted you to be something other than what you wanted -- something that would fit a marketer's ready-made demographics group. Things don't feel as constrained any more, but a lot of the other problems anti-consumerism tried to criticize are still as present as they ever were. But in that moment, I was still a huge poo poo about it. A few of my friends had begged me to lean off the stuff because me ranting about how mainstream culture was suffocating to be around made me, too, suffocating to be around.
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Jun 3, 2016 23:09
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"haha culture jamming is so good, i am blowing minds here" thought college freshman popular thug drink as he sharpied moustaches on ads with female models on the subway
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Jun 3, 2016 23:14
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When I graduated undergrad with a worthless BA in Music Theory and Composition I had some trouble finding any good jobs, and I certainly wasn't going to get any jobs in my field of study, because I am a terrible musician. Everything about that sentence is true and I feel no shame; I've come to terms with how dumb it was to A) get a worthless degree and B) get that degree in something in which I had no real skill. This is what happens when you "follow your dreams." At the time though I was quite angry about my prospects. I was working three lovely jobs to make ends meet and living in my parents' basement. The year was 1998 and I was 27 years old; I had been in undergrad for 8 years. I would love to say that I worked hard to get my degree done, but the fact of the matter is that it was 5 years of full-time while my degree track was Music Ed, and I was one semester short of graduating, the student teaching semester, when I had a breakdown and realized that I couldn't do what would be expected of me. So, rather than just suck it up and do the student teaching semester, pass it with like a C or whatever and graduate so that I could move on with my life, I changed my major to Theory & Comp because it was the degree for which I had to take the fewest classes to graduate - but it would take six fall & spring semesters to do it. So, there it is. 8 years of undergrad, 220 credit hours of classes while either degree I was studying for prior to graduation only required 120 hours, and a thoroughly mediocre 2.75 GPA out of 4. All because I completely lacked the self-awareness to realize that I just wasn't talented enough to make a career as a musician. It was at this time, while working as a housekeeper at a conference retreat facility (that's $8.00/hr at a time when minimum wage was like $5.35; I worked another $8.00/hr job at a loving toy store at the mall where my manager was two years out of high school, and another job as a bartender at a restaurant on the weekends making jack poo poo but what covered my liquor expenses), that I started listening to talk radio while I was cleaning up buildings and lodging accommodations at the retreat center. And in 1998, when you said "AM Talk Radio," you pretty much meant "Rush Limbaugh." And I'm there sweeping, and mopping. washing laundry, making beds, cleaning bathrooms, shoveling snow, washing dishes and all kinds of other poo poo that (let's face it) nobody really wants to be doing for a job; least of all somebody who has just recently been given a BA (notice I didn't say earned...I put in the time, but I'm pretty sure the degree was a mercy kill method of getting me out of the university), and I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh. Now, he was already really big on the radio back then - much moreso than he is now - in fact it was right before the time that he had a TV show on network television, of all things. It might have been Fox, but I don't remember. And I'm listening to him, and I'm thinking, "Yeah, he's right...gently caress poor people" as I'm working three lovely jobs and living in my parents' basement to make ends meet. "Yeah, he's right...gently caress immigrants" as I was living in the middle of the Midwest where there were literally zero minorities of any kind, much less immigrants. "Yeah, he's right...gently caress Democrats" because...well, I never could really figure that one out other than to say "Monica Lewinski" "blowjob" "cigar" "blue dress" "disgraceful behavior for a sitting US president arrrrggghhhh" "Yeah, he's right...gently caress the gays and their entitlements" after I had personally experienced an absolutely real and honest emotional moment as five of my fraternity brothers all came out of the closet at once during a fraternity meeting - and not that I'd had anything against gays; I just literally did not get the message about the discrimination and hate crimes that they had to deal with as well as their own identity crises (it was 1998, remember..."gays" were pretty much all closeted except for the super-duper flaming gays that everyone just found to be kinda funny) "Yeah, he's right...gently caress minorities" as I'd grown up in the middle of whitesville surrounded by whites only and with no exposure to blacks, hispanics or asians other than what I saw on TV or in the movies (frame of reference: every black person in a movie was in a gang or was Eddie Murphy, and his career had already started to tail off) "HOLY poo poo THE DEMOCRATS ARE THE PARTY OF MINORITIES AND GAYS - AND THAT'S NOT RIGHT - AND THE JEWS CONTROL BOTH THE MEDIA AND THE BANKS TO PUSH THEIR JEW AGENDA, AND THE GAYS ARE TRYING TO MUSCLE IN THEIR GAY AGENDA AS WELL AND WE'LL HAVE TO TEACH KIDS ABOUT HOMO SEX IN SCHOOLS - AND THE MEXICANS ARE TAKING MY JOBS!!! WAR ON CHRISTMAS!!! FEMINAZIS - HOW MUCH MORE DO THESE WOMEN WANT???" And, so - yeah. That's how it happens. That's how a naieve but ridiculously un-self-aware white young man with a college degree gets caught up in ridiculous conservative rhetoric and starts believing proto-FOX News garbage. Thankfully, soon after this I got a "real" job in Chicago and moved to the city, which changed everything in my mind about all of that bullshit. If that hadn't happened, if I hadn't taken that job and moved to the city, if I'd stayed in Shitsville working at lovely Shitsville jobs, I'd probably be an angry Fox News viewer with a hard-on for Sarah Palin and I'd still think Megyn Kelly was loving hot (she is) but she might want to tone down her criticism of chauvinist behavior (she shouldn't). Before that - before Rush Limbaugh - I'd never really had a political thought in my head. I just didn't care. It didn't affect me. But Rush Limbaugh seriously made me feel like all that poo poo was SUPER important and Bill Clinton was going to turn America into a socialist state as soon as he took away our guns.
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Jun 4, 2016 00:38
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Morroque posted:
It is almost hard to understand, and it might be impossible for people under the age of about 25 to grasp, but there was once a very serious and impermeable barrier between "mainstream" corporate culture and "alternative" culture. It was a worthwhile thing to point out the lack of coverage of alternative areas by the mainstream culture, because even something rather slight, like minority representation on television shows, was a big issue. If you lived in North Dakota, and Seinfeld wasn't showing you black people in NYC, that would seriously be something you could complain about. But I think the divide started to crack by the early 2000s and obviously by the end of that decade, we had Sarah Palin railing against the "Lamestream media" I think for the adbusters crew, and for their impressionable young audience, media awareness was a magic bullet that would automatically transform people and make them question "the establishment". I think that when it didn't happen, they either thought of other hypothesis, or just doubled down on the media awareness needing to be more absolute, and to cut out any type of culture that was at all attached to the "mainstream"
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Jun 4, 2016 00:43
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glowing-fish posted:I think for the adbusters crew, and for their impressionable young audience, media awareness was a magic bullet that would automatically transform people and make them question "the establishment". I think that when it didn't happen, they either thought of other hypothesis, or just doubled down on the media awareness needing to be more absolute, and to cut out any type of culture that was at all attached to the "mainstream" Interesting... So by the time I arrived on that scene, they were long out of ideas and just running on fumes. My experience of them (and perhaps more importantly, the others they inspired) very logically follows from that point. Kind of sad, really.
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Jun 4, 2016 01:25
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In grade 10, during the obligatory 9/11 story. where we all were watching the television instead of doing our first class, a kid said "what do we care, they're American." and I remember very clearly saying "don't be an idiot, there's going to be a war." Over the next three years I became obsessed with the war until I came upon #ce while looking for live webcam feeds of Shock and Awe and became a goon right at the height of the D&D libertarianism period. I had been reading all the wrong websites to try and figure out what was going on in the Middle East so I defended Bush and America. University and LF cured me.
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Jun 4, 2016 01:37
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Morroque posted:Interesting... So by the time I arrived on that scene, they were long out of ideas and just running on fumes. My experience of them (and perhaps more importantly, the others they inspired) very logically follows from that point. Kind of sad, really. Well, apparently, they were founded in 1989, so they are almost 30 years old by this point. Even by 1994, when I was not yet 16, Coca-Cola was doing "antiadvertisements" with the ill-fated OK Soda. So yeah, even in the late 1990s, the entire idea of "well, you can't trust TV!" was a little played out.
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Jun 4, 2016 02:03
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i was raised by holocaust deniers basically i went through all the embarassing phases of political consciousness that most teenagers do, but instead of each step being more embarassing than the last, each one made me a little bit more normal. i remember the moment when i first thought of myself as a liberal and went "wow, i've been worrying far too much, the world is actually a pretty cool and good place and generally headed on the right track" which is to say, i still hadn't quite made it out of the Bad Opinion Zone, so i guess that's the first one that was actually "mine"
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Jun 4, 2016 02:18
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I used to think politics was somber and important and gave a huge poo poo about things like that "democRAT" ad for sullying the discourse
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Jun 4, 2016 03:21
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When I was 7 I thought all gay people should be put on an island by themselves. My mom ripped me a new rear end in a top hat for that comment.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i was raised by holocaust deniers It's pretty amazing you made it out of that. Hopefully it's easier than I expect.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:43
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I used to be the dude that Martin Luther King wrote about in his letter from Birmingham Jail. Now I hate other people for being that dude.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:51
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downout posted:It's pretty amazing you made it out of that. Hopefully it's easier than I expect. I'm not sure hard or easy is exactly the word for it, I think it mostly comes down to your environment. If enough of your peers and role models keep telling you you're wrong, and you can't just retreat to an environment that confirms and reinforces the worst in you, sooner or later you'll change. My "eureka" moment wasn't when I consiously decided to change, it was when something suddenly reminded me of all the things I used to believe and realized I didn't any more. Of course, that's just getting the ball rolling; I don't think there's a point where anyone should stop questioning their own values, least of all if they have my track record, and that's where it gets to be hard work.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:34
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Zeroisanumber posted:In 8th grade I thought that the idea of instituting a benevolent neo-colonialism sort of program where big, rich countries would take over small, poor, dysfunctional countries and fix them up would be good for everyone. I put it down to knowing nothing about colonialism or Vietnam, and just enough about WWII to be dangerous. Take up the White Man's burden And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard— The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:— "Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?"
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Jun 4, 2016 04:55
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nvm
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Jun 4, 2016 04:57
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Embarrassing libertarian phase that supported enough of my self identity to leave me a wreck of shame and regret when I got clued in during the great D&D/LF realignment of 2006-2010. Was an idiot prolific teenage war monger on our very D&D in 2002 and no idea how I managed to never swallow my own tongue.
386-SX 25Mhz VGA fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jun 4, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 05:13
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I had libertarian leanings in high school, mostly in a naive "if we abolished political correctness and treated everyone equal it would all work out " Then I got into college and came out as trans and that was the end of that.
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Jun 4, 2016 05:24
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My econ teacher in senior year of highschool showed us all the "American Dream" animated movie. Was libertarian until a friend snapped me out of it.
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Jun 4, 2016 05:29
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Anchor Wanker posted:My econ teacher in senior year of highschool showed us all the "American Dream" animated movie. Was libertarian until a friend snapped me out of it. oh yeah those alfred sloan foundation disney shorts from the 40s about how capitalism owns and labor unions and communists are the devil are amazing. in the bad sense of 'amazing' edit: oh wait you're talking about some lovely internet flash cartoon movie. dang
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Jun 4, 2016 05:30
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I remember those Disney shorts but I recalled them saying "Yes Unions own but in a communist society you would only get one and it would be the government's union, not yours"
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Jun 4, 2016 05:55
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Fojar38 posted:I remember those Disney shorts but I recalled them saying "Yes Unions own but in a communist society you would only get one and it would be the government's union, not yours" Eh, yeah, it's been a long time since I saw them. I'm pretty sure they showed the idealized small shopkeeper and business owner in a glowing light compared to unions but yeah most of the hostility was towards Soviet Communism icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Jun 4, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 06:19
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I believed that a utilitarian state was a great idea.
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Jun 4, 2016 06:25
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my opinions have always been good for real though: icantfindaname posted:Take up the White Man's burden And reap his old reward: Despite having generally great English teachers, I was really bad at reading for deeper meaning throughout my teen years and even through half of college and tended to take a lot of things at face value and believe people I really shouldn't have, leading to some bad opinions I won't go into. But the first time my high-school freshman-year English teacher read that poem out loud, with no prologue or preparation in order to gauge our reactions, my response was "This is satire, right? Aha, it's a joke! I get things now!" I didn't. 
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Jun 4, 2016 07:03
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minimalist posted:Despite having generally great English teachers, I was really bad at reading for deeper meaning throughout my teen years and even through half of college and tended to take a lot of things at face value and believe people I really shouldn't have, leading to some bad opinions I won't go into. Aww come on, you can't just say that and then not elaborate.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:06
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Was pretty lifestyle-sheltered as a kid, didn't believe transpeople were a thing, had a trans friend at 15 or so, told him his gender dysphoria wasn't a thing for the very scientific reason "you play the hand you're dealt," another trans student at our school was murdered the following year, still feel like an rear end in a top hat.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:14
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Ytlaya posted:Aww come on, you can't just say that and then not elaborate. Eh, nothing too unusual in the end. Mainly a really noxious, conservative religiosity. Because I was really bad at interpreting meaning and intention I really just believed whatever I was told about anything regarding human behavior or anything outside my realm of experience, so (thanks to certain terrible teachers at a conservative religious elementary school) I spent a good portion of my tween years railing against those poop-eating, baby-raping, America-destroying homosexuals until I gradually began to realize that a lot of other men were actually pretty goddamned sexy and I really wanted to explore the destruction of America with them.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:41
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wrote a speech in HS suggesting the CIA overthrow saddam, instead of engaging in a protracted war figured out only later that liberalism is the practice of negotiating with oneself until one finds himself agreeing with monsters (Shah'ing Iraq to take their carbon would've been horrific, too)
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Jun 4, 2016 08:11
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OwlFancier posted:I used to be the dude that Martin Luther King wrote about in his letter from Birmingham Jail. Dude in every D&D leftism thread you're still that guy, agreeing with the bourgeoisie that it was just terrible those X did a revolution that was impolite
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Jun 4, 2016 08:19
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