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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I've said this before, but since we're discussing it:
Back before college, I was definitely right-leaning. Part of it was my conservative Christian upbringing, but another part was I grew up in a small town of less than 2,500 people. That is the ultimate hotbed of conservative echo chambers. One of my best friends growing up, in retrospect, had some bigoted views- just to give a couple examples of some of the awful things he said, I remember one time he compared black people to monkeys, and another time said that there must be something mentally wrong with gays. I haven't spoken to this person in over ten years but I doubt we'd get along today.
It took going to college and then living on my own in a big city to change my viewpoints. It wasn't an immediate attitude change, just a gradual shift. The main attitude I started to take on is the Golden Rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the right-leaning leaders don't follow this basic human decency rule. They want to either control how people live, say "Fuck you got mine", or pass judgment on people whose lifestyle they don't agree with. Or a combo of all three. And considering that many right-leaning leaders claim to be Christians and still hold these uncaring viewpoints, it really turned me off them.
edited 2nd Apr '17 10:13:44 AM by speedyboris
Yeah, my particular situation was similar to Wispy's. I also am (or at least make the effort of trying to be) empathetic towards other peoples plights, but got caught up in the /r/TiA bullshit (as a lurker) at a moment in life where I was completely alone, and didn't understand enough about a lot of what "de sjws" actually were talking about, so I found it dumb. Then I started reading people here clearly debate that stuff and started understanding just how horrible the r/TiA crowd was. Also, at the time most of the racism there was dogwhistles and misleading infographics, so I also missed a lot, it wasn't as blatant as it is now.
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVI used to be more Libertarian, back when I was reading Heinlein and Clancy and was going through my young adult "Get everybody out of everybody's business and we'd all do fine" phase. My father, in particular, seemed to have a lot of leanings that way, but ironically, in talking with him I kind of sorted myself out of that, as it became increasingly clear that pure Libertarianism is a utopian ideology that cannot work in practice.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"IMHO Travis Kalanick of Uber infamy (no I'm not a fan of Uber) is a textbook example of everything wrong with Libertarianism. Which is ironic considering he backpedaled on the Libertarianism a couple years back. For even more irony points, his business only survives because venture capitalists keep giving him money. He's a shitty businessman.
edited 2nd Apr '17 7:24:19 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedSome slight changes later, now I have a political identity, having worked with Dems for most of my career so far, and
edited 2nd Apr '17 7:48:16 AM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesDespite living in rural areas in red states most my life, both my parents are pretty left leaning; they both worked in education as librarians, so that helped. It's kind of silly to admit, but I think the media I watched as a kid also helped a lot; Power Rangers was my favorite show, and even if the Black and Yellow Rangers were just token characters (with unfortunate color choices), it did show me that people of different races were perfectly decent people, and I tended to like them over the others anyway. My favorite ranger was Billy (blue), and it's sad to know his actor was harassed for being gay behind the scenes. I can't be a homophobe when one of my childhood heroes was played by a gay man.
All that said, I do think I would have been swayed to alt-right beliefs had I not been determined to know better. For instance, it's real easy to paint misogyny as men's rights; it makes sexism sound like social justice. And while I'm all for LGBT rights, I have met a couple Camp Gay people while working on a cruise ship, and it can feel uncomfortable around them at times. That just kind of made me realize what women might feel like around aggressive men though.
edited 2nd Apr '17 8:10:02 AM by StarOutlaw
I don't think I could ever have mustered the necessary cognitive dissonance to ever be alt-right, and I'm thankful for that. Firstly, I'm a brown man, Indian American to be precise, and with a beard or a few days' worth of stubble, I'm indistinguishable from the stereotypical Muslim that every right wing rube wants to run out of the country. I could never rub shoulders with them. I'm the son of immigrants, so I simply can't support their nativism ("America first" brings to mind a fat redneck with a belly full of shitty beer firing a gun in one hand, holding a hotdog in the other), and that extends to their support of dying industry, hatred of trade, and complete disinterest in foreign relations except to make paranoid claims of a worldwide cabal of elites. I mean, when I meet these people, it's a countdown until I hear some racist comment, advocacy of herrenvolk government, or what have you. They're just unpleasant. That said, I'm sure there were moments where I was less than a committed advocate of feminism or gay rights than I am now, which I've since forgotten, but it was more likely a product of hypocrisy than genuine opposition, since I've always considered myself to be of the left.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."I used to buy into the really fundamentalist Christianity, but I don't think I could have gone alt-right. I've never understood racism, on a really fundamental level. It just seems like a massive waste of time and energy to hate people for, quite frankly, aesthetic differences. It's an irrational concept that adds absolutely nothing to life and only serves to hurt people.
I'm disabled, dependent on government healthcare and drug plans to reasonably function (though I could survive), have LGBT people in my immediate family and inner circle of friends and classmates, am a prospective public servant (and let me tell you, bureaucrat school does its best to keep you in the political mainstream
), am from a region that a truly right wing movement would fuck over economically and environmentally to feed their heartland, and I tend to love those pesky facts too much.
Economically I am firmly center left, socially I'm all for equality and accommodation (though sometimes I'll support incrementalism if moving too quick will bolster the reactionaries), I think rehabilitative justice should be the first option (though some people are better left locked up) and I think that internationalism is the only way to ensure the continuity of the human species. That said, over the past 5 or 6 years I have moved somewhat to the right on military interventionism and spending, though I still consider myself a firm centrist on that front and its not a Single-Issue Wonk.
So yeah, I don't think I could ever go anywhere near the alt-right. I need valid reasons to start to feel hatred.
edited 2nd Apr '17 8:49:11 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.The closest I've been to the Alt-Right was almost drinking the MRA cool aid note , but getting into TV Tropes and seeing the views and arguments of people who were very different than me, helped changing some of my views related to the world. Besides, the public here is very often nice and use well made arguments to show where I was in the wrong.
I'm a South American of Sephardi heritage, two things the Alt-Right despises and I've never liked Nazis or Far-Right(and Left) nationalists anyway.
edited 2nd Apr '17 8:51:19 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesWhoa, whoa. When I said Middle America was a mistake, it was a joke borne out of frustration for people who keep fucking themselves.
You're gonna need to expand on this. What do you mean? Who am I bigoted to?
Because the only people I've been hostile to are Trump supporters, corporations(apparently they're people)and political sell outs.
edited 2nd Apr '17 9:11:19 AM by MadSkillz
So, it turns out that while nothing Trump says seems to be phasing his supporters... the courts are another story. A judge in Kentucky is ordering a lawsuit against Trump, stating that he incited violence against protesters at a March 2016 rally, to be continued
, while Trump's lawyers are trying to claim that he didn't mean it and that it was covered under freedom of speech.
Basically, the violence only occurred after Trump said, multiple times, "Get them out of here" and it can clearly be construed as Trump wanting the crowd to do something. There's a good case here that Trump deliberately incited violence, one of the few forms of speech that isn't covered by the First Amendment. This isn't a case where plausible deniability can come into play, because inciting violence doesn't mean that you gave clear and direct orders.
With all the lawsuits and court trials, Trump's surrogates and supporters are going to be trapped into the corner of "Trump doesn't mean anything he says" because otherwise they're going to have to admit things like this.
edited 2nd Apr '17 9:13:00 AM by Zendervai
I always took reverse racism to mean "positive" racism against a minority. It was a running gag in The Animal (where I first learned the concept) that the black character kept getting preferential treatment precisely because he was black.
EDIT: Some levity from the @PresVillain
twitter. Donald Trump's words in the Red Skull's mouth:
MANY ARE NOT EVEN TRYING TO COME IN ANYMORE! #PresidentSupervillain
THE LOVE & STRENGTH IN OUR PARTY!!! #PresidentSupervillain
edited 2nd Apr '17 9:43:15 AM by sgamer82
Reverse racism stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how racism is socially structured — what made and makes racism against people of color so intractable in the short term is that democracy almost everywhere is herrenvolk democracy, the immediate downside of nationalism. There's a ruling or privileged class that receives the lion's share of benefits, is the beneficiary of most of the country's economic activity, and the politics are deliberately biased in their favor. Every country is like this, and if they're not, it's because they don't have a lot of immigration. Throw a few refugees in the mix, and the racists pop up like weeds. White people want to — and to a large degree, feel the need to — deny that a society at large is racist, because that would mean that a government isn't catering only to them. It's basically NIMBY on a nationwide scale, but it's why reverse racism is a complete myth — a black man can call a white man a cracker, but the white man still has the government's ear, so there isn't any oppression going on; they're still going to get jobs, housing, good schools, and government aid because the slur is just that — a word — and it has no meaning in a broader context.
edited 2nd Apr '17 9:50:11 AM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."I'm a straight white man from a middle-class background, which I guess should have put me in the "high-risk" category for getting drawn into the alt-right, but I don't think I've ever really been much of a conservative. Over the past year, the Bernie Sanders campaign got me increasingly interested in left-wing ideas, and everything makes a lot more sense now that I look at issues from a left-wing perspective.
Concerning the Cracked article someone linked a few pages back, #4 is a really good point. My views have probably changed more from eavesdropping on other people's political discussions than engaging in those discussions myself.
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!![]()
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I felt like maybe the majority were white but I already knew a good many of the regulars were Po C or LGBT+. I'm in an awkward situation where I benefit from white privilege in my own country but would definitely be considered a Po C in the US. The tan kinda gives it away :'p
edited 2nd Apr '17 10:18:19 AM by Draghinazzo
Well, young white male here plus ASD. Fair to say "privileged", even without skin colour (unless ASD counts as an exception).
But the German education system, a book about racism that I read in lieu of religious studies in Bavaria, Wikipedia's articles on race issues, a pro science attitude and the minarets referendum came ahead of any pro-alt right influences.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanWell, I am a cis/het white-Anglo Saxon man from Maine, which at the time I was in high school was literally more than 99% white, rural, and fairly religious. In a high school of 800, I could count the number of non-white students on two hands, and I did not meet a single person who identified as not cis/het until I was in college. I was raised in one of the most heterogeneous echo chambers you will find outside a Midwest hamlet, and I consider it a minor miracle I did not fall into the Alt-right. Poor, living hand to mouth on seasonal work, with most people I knew casually racist, sexist and homophobic, and raised around a combination of devout Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses.
I do not even want to consider what I would be if I failed to get into college on a scholarship.

I'm black. Can't go alt-right by default.
😂
New Survey coming this weekend!