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I was a hardcore solipsist. You don't even exist, man. Ontologically, still am I guess, but pretty soon you just have to say it doesn't matter if something is real or not.
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Jun 4, 2016 08:24
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A variety of them, was libertarian for a stretch, stopped when I noticed it was contradictory. I still haven't found a good answer though, everything's flawed.
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Jun 4, 2016 14:05
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"Communism only works on paper, human nature (which is real and exists) prevents it from being implemented in real life."
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Jun 4, 2016 14:19
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I had a stretch of being libertarian-ish that was dumb in a "make sure minorities and women have guns to shoot all the racists and/or rapists with"    sort of way. It's kind of a blur but I was drinking shitloads if vodka and it was a long time ago.
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Jun 4, 2016 14:27
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rudatron posted:A variety of them, was libertarian for a stretch, stopped when I noticed it was contradictory. I still haven't found a good answer though, everything's flawed. So you've settled on nihilism? I'd love to know why so many young people go through an obnoxious libertarian phase. Is there some sort of cabal pushing Ayn Rand novels on impressionable teenagers?
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Jun 4, 2016 17:02
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smg77 posted:So you've settled on nihilism? I think it's because as a teenager you have an unrealistic sense of what you are capable of doing and just believe that if mom and dad stopped putting all these loving "rules" on you you'd show them all how great you were. Adulthood subsequently feeds or destroys this delusion.
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Jun 4, 2016 17:09
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I flirted with Communism back in college. Never crossed the line fully but I did believe in some, embarrassingly, naive things. Before that I was also a huge supporter of the Democratic Party and saw most people in the party as those who truly will fight for the poor and working class. I was a big Michael Moore fan too.
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Jun 4, 2016 17:24
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HorseLord posted: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 I appreciate why you'd think so but there is a distinction between suggesting that some forms of direct action are probably ineffective and saying it's more important to preserve order than justice. MLK was 100% right in that letter. There's a difference between saying "Doing X puts you in the wrong and means you don't deserve the thing you want." and "Doing X maybe isn't going to be super conducive to achieving the thing you, and I, want in the long run." OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Jun 4, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 20:10
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smg77 posted:I'd love to know why so many young people go through an obnoxious libertarian phase. Is there some sort of cabal pushing Ayn Rand novels on impressionable teenagers? it's a combination of two factors which psychologically become predominant when you first start to get your adult mind, the ability to logically reason and a sense of your own power to change your world. if you don't have a robust sense of empathy yet (notice how many people say 'until i went to college' or 'until i moved to the city' and my eyes were opened!) then it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you're special and awesome and you've figured it all out and if only everyone thought like you did then the world would be so much better of course this explains all political extremism in youth but libertarian is especially attractive to teens and young adults because it's basically no, gently caress you dad the philosophy
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Jun 4, 2016 20:15
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My senior year in high school and freshman year of Community College I was a registered Libertarian because I watched Penn and Teller's Bullshit and my Philosophy 101 teacher was a big time Randian (author of several books about her). While working as Summer Help with my local water authority, my coworker was also a big time Libertarian with dreams of being a Venture Capitalist and also non denomination Protestant with that awful German work ethic and kept telling me "Hey we could do a good job, or we could do a GREAT job" when he wanted to get the thousands of hydrants we had to paint done in a month instead of stretching that work out for the whole Summer instead. He also hated the idea of finding places in our borough where our bosses couldn't find us and sleep for an hour or two because we couldn't mow any of the company owned lawns at 7 am. And for a guy who was against big government he sure liked working for them. Also it was around this time I went back to being Catholic after having an edgy anti-theist phase and hearing this jagoff blather on how worthless Great Works and helping your fellow man was made me realize how selfish I was and that Libertarianism was awful.
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Jun 4, 2016 20:30
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smg77 posted:So you've settled on nihilism? I think the healthy part about it is that the teenage years are the years when people discover a truly autonomous sense of self, like they are becoming emotionally and logistically independent, and hyperautonomy is just a natural outgrowth of that. I also am probably not going too far out on the limb by saying that part of it might be a reaction by young men towards the pressures of forming romantic relationships...a case of sour grapes of not being able to form attachments to people. Notice that very few women go through a obnoxious libertarian phase!
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Jun 4, 2016 23:53
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I was a loving centrist and I voted for Bayrou in 2007. I'm still ashamed.
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Jun 5, 2016 00:18
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glowing-fish posted:Notice that very few women go through a obnoxious libertarian phase! The very premise of this thread is kind of alien to me. I've never had any major ideological crisis or hung around anyone who has, it's always just been a continual process of learning and fine-tuning. "Don't be a loving rear end in a top hat" is a pretty resilient basis for political thought. 
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Jun 5, 2016 02:04
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A lot of this thread seems to be along the lines of "I used to have ideals, but I learned over time to capitulate to the whims of capital. How silly I was, to entertain hopes of a better world." The other half is libertarianism.
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Jun 5, 2016 04:08
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I used to think gender is a social construct but then I wisened up.
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Jun 5, 2016 05:05
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted: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. What was it like before then? Were there a bunch of libertarians? How did a forum that costs $10 to post on end up with so many leftists? Pomplamoose fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 08:32
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:i got into libertarianism through radley balko's "gently caress the police" reporting Out of curiosity since you are one of the few still posting, what did you think at the time when D&D went hard anti-libertarian. The puppy avatar era. And what do you think about it now?
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Jun 5, 2016 14:18
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Bastard Tetris posted:I was chanting "four more years!" at a Reagan rally. I was 4, but still that's pretty fuckin shameful. You were just so happy to be alive.
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Jun 5, 2016 14:22
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OwlFancier posted:I appreciate why you'd think so but there is a distinction between suggesting that some forms of direct action are probably ineffective and saying it's more important to preserve order than justice. MLK was 100% right in that letter. It's a shame then that you've actually argued very hard against doing things that were effective, because they "put you in the wrong".
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Jun 5, 2016 14:45
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HorseLord posted:It's a shame then that you've actually argued very hard against doing things that were effective, because they "put you in the wrong". What was your first bad opinion, HorseLord? Was it revisionism, or a youthful flirtation with left-communism?
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Jun 5, 2016 15:27
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I somehow simultaneously held all the following opinions when I was in High School (late 90s): - Strong Dominionism (before I knew it had a name, I just knew that the laws of the country should be the same as the laws of the Bible) - "The only two legitimate functions of government are police and military" libertarianism - Every municipality should have public transit (because I had been to Germany and really loved being able to take the bus around, even in smaller towns) and the only reason they didn't was because of market distortions caused by big government to lower gas prices
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Jun 5, 2016 16:57
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Brainiac Five posted:What was your first bad opinion, HorseLord? Was it revisionism, or a youthful flirtation with left-communism? I was a pioneer in "but what about male abuse victims" around the age of 14, but it quickly stopped when I started to actually interact with women
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Jun 5, 2016 17:21
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HorseLord posted:I was a pioneer in "but what about male abuse victims" around the age of 14, but it quickly stopped when I started to actually interact with women read that and thought you meant the USSR youth pioneers for a second
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Jun 5, 2016 17:23
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I was a socialist when I was younger. Even edited a pretty important newsletter.
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Jun 5, 2016 17:55
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TomViolence posted:A lot of this thread seems to be along the lines of "I used to have ideals, but I learned over time to capitulate to the whims of capital. How silly I was, to entertain hopes of a better world." The other half is libertarianism. it explains quite a lot
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Jun 5, 2016 19:29
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I had an angry MRA phase. Then I transitioned
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Jun 5, 2016 21:43
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Lichy posted:I used to think gender is a social construct but then I wisened up. What a coincidence, I used to think that trolling D&D was funny. Seriousposting: aside from the usual teenage libertarian phase (and my formative years spent thinking my father couldn't have been TOTALLY wrong when he said that Rush Limbaugh was worth listening to), it's hard for me to think of anything where I was really bad politics-wise. Worst thing I can think of outside that timeframe was my belief that "go in to Iraq, take out Saddam, get the gently caress out" would have resulted in something remotely positive. (Then again, I still wouldn't be entirely surprised if this particular counterfactual had somehow turned out better than what actually did happen.)
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Jun 5, 2016 23:25
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Flowers For Algeria posted:I was a loving centrist and I voted for Bayrou in 2007. what sold you on this charismatic leader
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Jun 5, 2016 23:31
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I went through a Libertarian atheist phase in my teenage years. Now I'm a Liberal Agnostic who doesn't mind accompanying his parents to church on Sundays.
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Jun 6, 2016 11:22
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smg77 posted:So you've settled on nihilism? I can't speak for anyone else, but to me libertarianism worked because it had a kind of just-so story to it. It's one of those systems that, once you're 'inside' it, it's not hard to visualize all problems as relating to it in some way - the issue is that it's incredibly simplistic, and the 'surface' of it (i.e. it presents itself as kind of an extension of hippie-liberalism live and let live) contradicts its material reality (the recreation of feudalism). Though I can't deny there's probably a gendered component to it. Men are brought up with the expectation of being self-reliant, to ask for help is to declare weakness, which is never to be shown under any circumstances. So if you're a young man who's insecure about their gender, you'll end up over-compnesating, and advocating a world were everyone is expected to do everything themselves for themselves Because Liberty neatly squares with that. Which probably explains why it's a common thing for this sub, along with the idea that if you're here, you're somewhat interested in politics (so not having a position isn't acceptable). Same thing with reddit I guess.
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Jun 6, 2016 13:11
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A CRUNK BIRD posted:I voted for George W. Bush in 2004 I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In Florida. (I'm sorry.) Edit: While that's true, it's pretty empty on it's own. I was raised religious and fairly high on that social hierarchy (to the point of having had dinner with Paul and Jan Crouch, for those who know who they are), so that was what shaped my view of the world. When my parents became even more involved and tried to switch to one of those mega-churches I saw just how incredibly superficial and scammy it all was and dropped religion, but not the moral structure I'd grown up with. Gays were still bad and other minorities didn't even register. My community wasn't integrated, but it wasn't 100% white. What it was was pretty economically homogeneous, so none of the kids of minorities I knew had the experienced most of the poo poo that goes on firsthand, even though their parents had. Pretty typical "parents were republicans, friends parents were republicans, everyone listened to AM radio." political leanings. Changed my view on economics because I had followed the D&D libertarians into spreadsheets online (EVE) and watched the great libertopia experiment hilariously explode, to be replaced by a working form of socialism. As stupid as that sounds, watching ideas tested out in a sandbox and completely fail is a good way of making you think about why it happened. At least I didn't have to instigate coups in a half dozen south-american countries then support the resulting brutal dictatorships and still fail to figure it out, which is more than I can say for our country's leadership. On social issues that's pretty easy - I met people with different life experiences. Finding out friends were gay and were good people was one step, finding out how much poo poo they had to deal with because of it was the next. A few people I know have transitioned so that's something I can relate to instead of a nebulous Other. After a while, I made the connection that minorities I didn't know personally may have had incredibly bad experiences due to racism, institutional oppression or just social ostracism. Harik fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 14:07
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I blamed the bush presidency on Ralph Nader from 2000-2006
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Jun 6, 2016 14:58
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I also voted for Bush in 2000, but I am not sure it counts as a bad opinion since he was seemingly very earnestly representing a less interventionist foreign policy.
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Jun 6, 2016 15:55
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I was a hardcore Randroid libertarian in high school and a liberal from about 18-20. My high school literature teacher was a Rand fanatic and assigned Anthem and The Fountainhead as reading for the class. I never actually read Atlas Shrugged but I did pick up some Rothbard and some Hayek and some other far-right libertarian thinkers after reading Rand. Given that I live in Oklahoma, which is about as close to a libertarian utopia as you can get (the state government basically doesn't function and what little money it has mostly gets used to subsidize oil and gas companies or run the prisons), the ideology appealed to me less and less as I got older. It's hard to remain a libertarian when you live in a crumbling trailer home your parents bought from a junkyard for $120 because they couldn't afford anything else, or when you're surrounded by people who have lived in the same decrepit middle-of-nowhere shithole town for four generations, not because they want to, but because none of the few jobs available there pay enough for moving away to be a financially viable option. While I was aware of the Internet in high school I didn't really get to sink my teeth into it until I was out on my own, living in a college town that actually had some decent ISPs and having blown all of the money I saved up during high school on a new computer. The wider perspective available there, combined with the wider perspective you inevitably get exposed to on a college campus, made me realize that holy poo poo, things are pretty much poo poo everywhere, not just in my neck of the woods. I was still pretty big into capitalism, though, I just thought it needed a functioning state to work properly and that we really could have a glorious harmonious free market utopia if we just built up our social safety nets the right way and regulated it properly. I never finished my degree (I lost my scholarship and could either go into debt or immediately take on an apprenticeship in a skilled construction trade for good money, and chose option B), but the short time I spent there is probably what kept me from blaming all of society's problems on nonwhites and foreigners like everyone else in my hometown. Ironically, I think it was reading Rand that eventually turned me into a communist. While the opinions were terrible they did leave me open to the possibility of radical change, and the anarcho-capitalist political theorists I went on to read after her actually do a pretty drat good job of accidentally refuting their own ideology. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 17:00
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Sebadoh Gigante posted:What was it like before then? Were there a bunch of libertarians? How did a forum that costs $10 to post on end up with so many leftists? d&d used to be fairly mixed politically, with vicious arguments about everything. republicans and rightists generally got chased out as the iraq war soured, and libertarians fell out during the ronpaulpalooza of 2008. the extreme leftists all got sucked into LF and banned over the years, creating now-dead offsites. now d&d is basically the subforum where leftists talk about politics, there's more rightleaning political chat in GBS and GIP where people also bitch about the liberal hivemind
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Jun 6, 2016 18:09
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I was briefly a trotskyite in the 1990s. I was deeply offended at some really nasty racist political currents in australia at the time and when a Malay-indian friend left the country after a really nasty experience with some nazis I decided I wanted to go in fists first and *do something* about it. And the only people on campus I could see that where , where the ISO (Basically the Australian branch of the SWP). Got heavily into it for a bit before realizing I was hanging out with completely insane people. But for six months I was selling papers on weekdays, and getting into punch ups with neo-nazis on weekends. Fun fun fun. In the end I just dropped the trot nonsense and kept up with the "punch nazis" nonsense. 20 years later its more "stalk nazis online and let the 20yos do the punching stuff". And politically I dont think anybody does much of a good job of governing, so I guess I could be called a reluctant anarchist, of sorts.
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Jun 6, 2016 20:53
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Highschool-me was very concerned about sexual dimorphism in the brain, and had a strong need to find "biological justifications" for human sexuality and gender identify. I also subscribed to Sparticist for about a year in college, but was upset that they charged for it.
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Jun 6, 2016 21:13
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Popular Thug Drink posted:d&d used to be fairly mixed politically, with vicious arguments about everything. republicans and rightists generally got chased out as the iraq war soured, and libertarians fell out during the ronpaulpalooza of 2008. the extreme leftists all got sucked into LF and banned over the years, creating now-dead offsites. now d&d is basically the subforum where leftists talk about politics, there's more rightleaning political chat in GBS and GIP where people also bitch about the liberal hivemind This is the case for a lot of message boards. The right got tired of losing all the time and left. Libertarians peaked during Ron Paul's initial campaign, but once it fell flat on its face they retreated as they could no longer beat the drum of a dead ideology. The far left began to be a targeted more by other groups, as they were the new "out there" ideology with the right and libertarians gone. Moderates were pushed away from constantly being victim to the liberal PC policy. Today, only the center left and left wing remain on most message boards. It's a shame because political discussion has never been more dumb and boring. I miss when people actually argued about legitimate differences in our political systems, rather than treating slight variations as canyon sized differences. This Democratic primary has truly been political discussion at its very worst with "my candidate who has supported pro-POC legislation is more pro-POC than your candidate who supported pro-POC legislation!" The thing is, Something Awful wasn't even hit that bad. Some sites, especially NeoGaf, were hit extremely hard, with most of the top political posters banned or stepping out of all political discussions. To be fair, I wonder if this is a generation thing. The people who came of age at the 2000s are getting older now as they are pushing or in their thirties. Most forum posters skew toward their early 20s so many see things in a post-Obama lens. This probably explains why the right is pretty much extinct as not only do they have a poor track record, but they also aren't interested in actual governing. In contrast, the far left doesn't seem as sexy anymore as the left is dominating the youth vote, and at least the right wing's legislation is cock blocked thanks to the Dems being good at the presidential election. This is quite a contrast in the 2000s when reactionary legislation was being passed in droves and Republicans were seeping into the youth vote. When the left was being destroyed radicalism seemed like a much more rational solution. Come to think of it, it is very similar to why Michael Moore was hailed as hero by the left during the 2000s, yet today is seen as a war hero trying to employ the same rhetoric during peacetime. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 22:07
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gaf is a nest of rabid "Hilldawg" fans, mentioning the same of St Sanders there is sure to send them in a frothing rage.
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Jun 6, 2016 22:11
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SA is definitely aging, probably the average poster here now is in their thirties but there's still plenty of right wing political opinions on SA, they just don't post in d&d very often or they're very patient and not rattled when a dogpile starts i'd say political discussion in d&d is getting slightly better because even though it's mostly just a nerd version of the dozens rotten with oneupmanship at least people most ly agree on the same reality, like poor people aren't just lazy cheats and generally american military intervetion does more harm than good. back in 2003 there were bitter arguments over exactly how many WMDs we'd find in iraq
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Jun 6, 2016 22:15
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