askchapo

I've got family members who think consumers drive demand and don't believe that capital both restricts and drives consumer "choice"

Yeah, definitely my mother. She calls herself a "pagan socialist" but she's also into Trump. She's a virulent racist who mainly hates Latino people and the Spanish language. She's really bad. She'll scream at people to speak English if she hears any Spanish in her vicinity. She'll confront people minding their own business and will tell them to go back to Mexico, even if they're not Mexican. She's told a person from Pakistan to go back to Mexico.

She believes in a complex, bizarre religion that's a combination of Norse and Irish mythology she claims was eliminated by Christianity, which she says is the most destructive force on Earth. Most of her understanding of Norse mythology comes from the History Channel show "Vikings." Her understanding of Irish mythology seems to be more influenced by Game of Thrones than anything else. She doesn't read books, since she considers them "the words of another" and believes reading can only serve to pollute her pure mind.

She's a vocal Irish nationalist despite being American, but get this, she believes the British monarchy is the greatest force for good in the world. She wants a reunited Ireland, but under the UK because she says Britain rightfully owns Ireland. She's an American born in Chicago, by the way, and our family is descendant from Poland as far as I know.

My mother is strangely positive and understanding on LGBTQ rights. She's one of the only members of my family to support me being non-binary, for instance. And she's very positive about it and has a very firm grasp on gender and identity. I have no idea how though or where she learned any of it.

Also despite calling herself a socialist (she actually does know somewhat what a socialist is) she's deeply into Elon Musk and thinks he should be president after Trump dies. I really don't know what to call my mother other than a reactionary idiot.

Ron Paul Libertarian Aunt who works at national parks so she can be closer to the leylines.

My uncle still hates Deng for ruining communism and regrets the sino-Albanian split.

He also dislikes the PC police for erasing the fact that Mao smoked cigarettes and complains that portrayals of Mao these days doesn't include him with cigarette in hand anymore.

He's certain Maoists could have led another protracted People's war against Dengists and believes Shanghai and Shenzhen and that are capitalist hellscapes. Xi has been the only secretary of the CPC he has liked in decades. And even then it's critical support.

Spring Festival every fucking year he has a hot take about X host or comedian or actor in the Gala looks gay. He also chain smokes indoors while drinking 二锅头 and it makes the room smell like rubbing alcohol poured into an ashtray.

I mean at least his brain worms are mostly better than western brainworms (obviously aside from the homophobia and some racism towards south Asians), it's just that he's more critical of AES nowadays in a boomer way than he is critical of western imperialism (which he definitely is against, but when he complains it's about like how North Korea has strayed from Leninism or how breakfast 馒头 costs too much these days 80% of the time and America bad 20%). He's also critical of China's reluctance to intervene in global politics, if it were up to him, the People's Liberation Army should have been deployed to defend the revolution in Burkina Faso or Argentina like how Mao sent troops to defend the DPRK against the 美国鬼子. I keep saying "hey look maybe not getting involved in foreign conflicts like the late USSR is a good thing" but he still thinks the Soviets, for all their faults, could have won Afghanistan if they tried harder.

Pretty sure my uncle is a Nazbol. Used to be very active in the largest leftist party and then left over "wokeism." He wanted to purge the trans members and not focus as much on indigenous issues. The end result was him getting booted and moving to the far-right.

Now he advocates for universal healthcare, free public college, paid family leave, environmental protections, erasure of lgbt, indigenous that have been "westernized" losing their rights and status, as well as women not being allowed to divorce.

I look to me left.
I look to me right.
It me. I’m the

Of course I know them, they're me.

Being supportive of China is "weird politics" in the west.

I was talking to my Dad’s wife about the way capitalism controls us, including be media we consume, how all politicians are in the pocket of the capitalist overlords, and she was all in agreement, and yet she is a staunch Trump supporter. But she’s no stranger to hypocrisy, she also thinks that we should cut social spending while living off disability. It’s a real “rules for thee and not me” dichotomy. I do think she’d be a great ally in the revolution in a general sense tho.

Absolutely.

One that believes all kinds of alien and AI conspiracies. The alien ones are fun, the AI ones make me want to tear my hair out because they "know for certain" that AI is totally sentient and will take over the world. They're genuinely worried about this and it makes me feel bad. They're kinda doomer and nihilistic and it worries me. Wish I could cheer them up about the future.

The other is an alt-right wanker that believes in anti-woke shit.

Both listen to the Joe Rogan and Russel Brand podcast...

My dad once told me that Ghadaffi was masterminding the Muslim conspiracy to do great replacement in Europe by outbreeding white people. He is also really scared about China. When the Al-Aqsa Flood happened and zionist atrocities exploded, he justified the carpet bombing of Gaza by claiming that Hamas rockets "could just as well have killed as many people".

He is angry at reactionary politicians for doing austerity and being corrupt but he won't vote for anyone on the left because they're woke. Last election he voted for the succdems, hoping to get racism and non-woke welfare and then was shocked and disappointed when they did what they had spent the entire campaign saying they wanted to and formed a government with other reactionary parties to do racism and austerity instead.

My older brothers are zen fascists in denial. Both are well off Xennials whose struggle with white fragility which inspires the most kneejerk reactionary takes. They literally just argue however they need to in the moment and have zero coherent views. They are terrible at sources, they will cherry pick whatever article agrees with them especially if it's a 'local' news outlet. There takes are so clearly self centered that I often just argue that really most Americans are selfish assholes just like them. Therefore they shouldn't be surprised they're unhappy because that's the logical outcome of the bucket crab mentality.

Parents and one sibling believes that American healthcare is trash because it prioritizes profit over health, American culture is trash because they overwork you to death and everything is far away, Americans are trash because all they do is kill, but they are staunch Trump supporters because they don’t want democrats ushering in communism.

My other sibling believes that American healthcare is trash, but only because it has too many regulations.

Anticommunist woo woo crystals lover that also desperately wants everything socialism stands for.

Not family really, they're mostly just lib or con (though I guess one guy is like a "moderate" lib but clearly understands the world and capital better than the others, but chooses to be a class traitor and make $$$ rather than being left-wing much at all) but I have run into a lot of, shall we say, idiosyncratic views at the local worker co-op coffee shop.... you'd expect decent politics from people there, some of whom founded the worker co-op, but its really all over the place there:

1 with major terf-brain, one with almost-great politics but a closet misogynist, 1 regular who seems like a bernie type guy on the surface, but over time I've heard him multiple times discussing the republican primary candidates and seems to really like Vivek lmao, etc

It's me!

got a cousin who is simultaneously extremely pro indigenous people and extremely anti-vax / pro "freedom"

My brother would probably be the closest. He used to listen to Alex Jones all the time. I'm not sure what made him change his mind, but he stopped listening/watching his show. He's still hung onto some of the stuff he's heard from him though. He watches Jimmy Dore, Kyle Kulinsky, and John Oliver a lot now. And during the last presidential elections he was into Bernie and Yang. Now it feels like he's shifting further right again. Honestly not that weird, I guess, just kind of that American lack of political understanding outside of the framework that is presented to us.

There's one uncle who's politics is an uncomfortable spot.

For a while he's been sliding further and further right. When he was younger he was a communist and then, like, he became a liberal (I don't see him in the flesh much, or maintain a presence on the sites he uses anymore, but gossip is he's gone full tory now). Last time I had a big arguement with him was online almost a decade ago when he said that communist revolutionaries've only made countries they've liberated worse. Now I'm an anarchist and thus critical of many of the big socialist projects, but claiming they were worse than they were before the revolution is complete bullshit. So I asked him "do you think Russia was better under the Tsar?" and he was like, "yes." So I asked him how he felt about the pogroms tsarists carried out on the reg, and he just started doing the whole "whataboutism" shtick. And harped on at me about the huge death toll of communism and when I tried to tell him about how fudged those numbers are, he called me a genocide denier.

Now, I get a lot of you in thread have folks down the Q-hole or whatever. But being a bloke that grew up as Thatcher bollocksed the community he grew up in, from a family of commited communists. We're all scratching our heads over how he went that way.

For instance, I have an aunt who is definitely MAGA, and is flirting with Q-Anon ideas. However, she has pretty good views on the environment and animal rights.

Hippies do be like that.