TL;DR I was predisposed to skeptical and critical thinking, learned other people had emotions, actually believed in the right’s fake freedom rhetoric, and fell in love with a cute lefty boy (unrequited but good friends)
Also MAGA really exposed the ugliness
Edit: accidentally typed out my life story. See other reply for TL;DR
Unfortunately I can give no useful insights (except: empathy, understanding, and the desire for both). I was raised Christian and reasoned my way to paganism thinking there didn’t need to be a god for miracles to exist; then to atheism when I tried to prove magic and ghosts existed as an explanation; eventually debunking and abandoning the belief in the very concept of supernatural miracles. Similarly with my political views: it seemed more to be an inevitable journey, where I started in one place and, without my core beliefs changing, drifted to another which was more aligned.
As a teen I was big into Alex Jones and conspiracy theories to the point of losing friends before it was cool (pre-maga). Unfortunately for him, I took his advice and “did my own researcher”; becoming more disillusioned with his bullshit the more I learned. For one example, there was a great analysis paper on the sorts of energies and temperatures involved in 9-11, whose models perfectly matched the real world structural damage: no thermite or lasers needed. I bought into the h1n1 vax hoax from Ventura after I had the shot and thought I’d be crippled when then turned on the signal or whatever… But I wasn’t. Same with the Fukushima disaster Alex fearmongered about; turns out we’re not in a radioactive apocalypse. Retrospectively: he had a terrible track record for predictions.
I was a diehard freedom absolutist: yell fire in crowded theatres, everyone should open-carry everywhere. I wasn’t even American but I bought into the mythos, especially as promoted by the right. However I was a fan of star trek as a kid… And I hated the very concept of monetary systems. I wanted people to live free of control, and have the best lives possible. Still do. I also never cared for the social conservatism: i was bi* and was cool with LGBT; “the government has no place in a bedroom between consenting adults”. Also no racial prejudice: all deserved freedom (humans were foreign enough to the probably-autistic me; no need for further outgroups…) A severely existential and somber perspective has always been the basis for my worldview (I was a pretty fucked up kid).
That none of that has changed… But one thing did.
Beau of the Fifth Column yt channel, now Belle of the Ranch, was where I first heard this after my change towards the left: they said they believed in “the most amount of freedom for the most people”… I had believed “the right for me to swing my fist ends at your nose”, until I realized that threatening to hit someone can have just as much a real consequence for them as actually doing it. Race doesn’t exist biologically, certainly in no form that people would recognize colloquially: but people were racialized; racism self-manifested through systemic failures and active oppression. I could no longer pretend that race didn’t exist: it absolutely did, but we made it. Trying to be blind to it would cause more harm than using it as a shortcut tool for informing various socially-caused inequalities. Understanding that taught me, vividly, the concept of a real and impactful “social construct”; a concept which I had great disdain for: “facts don’t care about your feelings”…
However, if I had to point to something, there was one catalyst… My whole life, I’ve tried to understand people. Empathy, emotions, and even ‘the self’ did not come naturally to me. I learned with great effort and (luckily, through birth) the resources to permit such efforts. The one thing that really pushed that forward was falling in love. He leaned left, but hated SJW / tumblrite stupidity leading up to the height of gamergate. We had many overlaps, and I grew exponentially in the decade since meeting him and exploring these feelings. As creator ShoeOnHead would say about Sargon of Akkad (para): “I hated SJWs because they were terrible optics; you hated them because you thought they were causing the fall of western civilization”… Turns out we were both the former as well. The divide between the alt-right, their rhetoric and growing popularity, and the things conservatives claimed to care about became more evident, and my growing awareness and knowledge of social issues was pushing me much further to the left.
Just like when I was 8 years old, I still think money is pretty fucking stupid, and people should be able to live comfortable and free. What changed is that I think some “freedoms” are actually just tragedy-of-the-commons oppression (e.g. “freedom” to discriminate based on race) and must be restricted, and not everyone needs to be packing heat to live free (not needing to is more free… an armed society is not a polite society; polite people don’t need the threat of violence, much like good people don’t need the threat of hell)
I’ve gone from being super far rightwing to now being super far leftwing over the course of my life; yet somehow, “Brianna Wu is a fucking idiot” has remained constant.
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…it depends…
So when’s the movie
“The left can’t meme” is the right’s 3rd and only good joke. The only other two jokes they have is mentioning trans people are a thing and mostly resisting the urge to yell the N word repeatedly in place of a punchline.
… Or any of the rest of the entire world? Western MSM isn’t all that exists. Your (conspiracy-grade) bias is showing and it’s quite embarrassing.
Humans aren’t machines; they need freedom. Let people do their jobs without micromanaging their existence on the clock. Set and track performance, sure; but this is like tracking mouse movement as a metric for productivity: you’re gauging the wrong thing and it’s actively harming your efficiency.
Tankies gonna wankies. Block and move on.
I can’t find anything on this that isn’t either some random medium blog or outlets with well-documented histories of russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Sounds like bunk, probably bunk.
“Mamdani says he’ll comply with international law” fixed that for you
Ah, that could be the case I guess. But it’s not that i had a feeling of inconsistency: it’s just that I could understand how someone may see “violence is unacceptable” followed by “but glad he’s dead” to be disingenuous or some form of hypocrisy without thinking much about it; wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve had such a discussion.
A shortcut to understanding would be: I’d feel the same way if he had been killed by terminal cancer. I hate cancer, and I’d rather we lived in a world without it, and I’d have empathy for him and those who know him. But such a person being gone would still tip the cosmic scales towards a less hateful and othering world. Doesn’t make it right, doesn’t mean he deserved it, doesn’t mean I’d cheer for cancer.
I loved it when I learned that “movfuscation” was possible. Sort of an intuitive proof for Turing completeness.
It sure fucking feels that way sometimes. I had an argument with one of my parents the other day over the fact that she was completely incapable of understanding any distinction between a war and a genocide. “It’s war; they’re the enemy. You kill the enemy in war” - in direct response to me asking if she was okay with elementary schools being bombed.
Bizarre, surreal, and severely dejecting.
Perhaps being sane in an insane world is a type of insanity all it’s own.
Didn’t donate to Trump. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-suspect-trump-donor/
Could pick other things apart but less straight forward and I’m about to go to sleep, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Anyways, call it a 50/50 chance. But as I said: it doesn’t really matter.
Given the “hate” quote, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had left leaning beliefs. But does it matter? Conservatives were practically running with the trans-shooter narrative before his body even hit the floor. And for those who aren’t complete fucking morons, most understand that the only people who commit murders like this are mentally unwell which vastly overshadows whatever their voting preferences are.
There’s something to be said for conservative rhetoric appealing to and amplifying such delusional people, which may be why the vast majority of such violence is perpetrated by rightwingers. After all, a sociopathic lack of empathy contributes to both violence and bigoted worldviews. But they’re hardly causal, essential, or exclusive.
A crazy terminally-online white kid with a gun shot a racist fascist asshole dead. The reaction from both the right and the left is influenced very little by any other facts. Some people are sowing chaos and it’s working. Most don’t have the time, ability, capacity, or desire to sort through the mess and evaluate nuances and uncertainties: they’re just running with whatever fits their biases best. Not only does the truth not seem to matter, but what conclusions they’re drawing also doesn’t seem to matter because they already had them. It just nudged everything forward by a notch.
Of course he fits into a tidy narrative: whatever one the right wants. Clearly he’s trans, trans-adjacent, trans-influenced, trans-atlanic who did a bad because the social contagion eroding the social fabric of western (read: cis straight white male-dominated christian) civilization. We knew these facts before Kirk’s body hit the floor.
The rest of the “details” like, reality and evidence or whatever, doesn’t really matter.