chapotraphouse

The person who first told me to read Mao, which got me into Marxism-Leninism in general, has become totally incoherent during the pandemic. The difference between us is that I have experience participating in organizations and seeing them fail the marginalized up close, and I experienced some of the same relief Hồ Chí Minh described as I took in Marxism Leninism, but my friend's individualist tendencies have not exposed them enough to the fatal downsides of meandering eclecticism. They are now an antivaxxer who sees all public health as draconian, no AES are good enough for them, just sort of stuck at the Chomsky and Foucault despair dead end.

Met a kid online when I was a teenager who was the first communist I ever knew.
Then he went to college and was literally brainwashed by liberal propaganda.

The trotskyist who helped a lot to radicalize me (I later became an ML thanks to hexbear) got a good job with the teamsters and is now just a standard liberal as far as I can tell.

‘nothing will fundamentally shake the imperial machine so might as well pick

I hate to be the first person in history to point this out, but your friend's vote doesn't determine who sits in the imperial throne. Your friend's vote is a superficial indicator of personal support for a given aspiring war criminal. The imperial president is appointed by an unelected council of elders chosen by from the two wings of the US bourgeois party.

The friend who radicalized me is now a fascist-adjacent EU liberal.

It's depressing as fuck and I honestly don't know why, but at some point it's like he just decided to become a bad person. He was a communist when he was like 14, got me into it, then when he was like 17 he became a piece of shit. Insanely misogynistic, would only talk to women he wanted to have sex with, and just incredibly rude to people he didn't know, even when they were nice people.

Now he's moved to the Netherlands to study EU politics or something, and all I know about him comes from his Instagram posts. He posts ableist shit all the time, he's in love with the EU and he just posted a Ukrainian fascist badge which he owns.

I remember sitting in a park with him when we had just finished school, telling him that I was going to join an ML org. He snorted and called them larpers, to which I pointed out that he didn't do any political activity at all, and I'd rather larpers than nothing. He thought because he read Lacan and smoked weed and was cynical that he was above politics.

It's so depressing. He used to be genuinely empathetic. He was a feminist when every boy his age was sexist, he would always tell people of the evil shit the US does, he genuinely got angry at capitalism. Now he's just a sack of shit