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I miss being a liberal :( (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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CW: suicide, drug mention, ableism, islamophobia

I've loved politics ever since I was spergy little 10-year-old watching the fucking Glenn Beck Program (don't ask). I grew to love sociology in my teen years, and I always knew a bunch of rare facts like how the Soviet Union ended the gender pay gap in Eastern Europe over 50 years ago, or how queer acceptance scales almost exclusively with HDI, but I was severely limited by the aforementioned Standard American Upbringing.

It was so goddamn easy and enjoyable to talk to people about politics back then, especially since I hated both US parties and was essentially a Bernie Bro. I was able to fluently relate to and discuss common grievances of people within the US and without while being proud of my (in comparison) vast knowledge.

However, in 2025 I got caught up in the Chinamaxxing craze and after a couple months of study (Governance of China my beloved) I sort of crossed a threshold and all of the liberal sophistry I had once loved became nails on a chalkboard.

I genuinely can't talk to people about politics anymore without wanting to blow my brains out or feeling like I'm smuggling fentanyl precursor in my asshole OR being treated like a schizophrenic islamist talking about the CIA and US war crimes.

TAKE ME BAAAAAAACK I WANNA BE A WESTERN CHAUVANIST AGAIN I WANNA FEEL SMART AND ENLIGHTENED. FUCK YOU LENIN I DONT WANNA READ ANY MORE THEORY, PLEASE

edit: guys, I promise I'm not actually a chud anymore, and I have the Kim Il-Sung x Osama Bin Laden self-insert yaoi fanfiction to prove it.

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[–] 27 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I wouldn't want to go back, but it does get annoying from the standpoint of dealing with people who are knee deep in liberalism and think that mild reform is socialism; it can feel lonely. Part of the issue is I am just not as adept at teaching as I need to be. It's a lot easier when I can sit down and write through my thoughts. Harder when I'm trying to recall things in real-time and explain concepts that I intuitively understand but have never had to explain in words. Then there's stuff like diamat that I sort of understand but struggle to crystallize as a mental model. Saying "here's the empire and here are some of the entities who oppose it" is simple enough, but trying to explain diamat feels impossible and I don't know what it is about it that I'm not getting. Because there are a lot of concepts that I am able to simplify/summarize, put in more general terms, but for some reason this one trips me up.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago

    Dialectical Dispatches has a very good piece on diamat that explains it in detail. There's also this older one by Dash the Internet Marxist that does a great job breaking the complex philosophy down into bits that are easy to digest, I read it several times back when I first started going down the rabbit hole and it stuck with me.

    Even before studying Marxism I had this vague idea that woah dude things are complex systems and they are like in motion and stuff. This helped it all click together for me.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 3 days ago

    Dialectics were pretty straightforeward for me because they show up constantly in chemistry and biology.

    Honestly, I've never seen a better incarnation of a dialectic than a chemical reaction reaching equilibrium under one set of conditions and then changing to meet a different equilibrium under different circumstances.

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