Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Pearls before swine.
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Politically Aware: How Old?
- Thread starter Zardnaar
- Start date
Lohrenswald
世界的 bottom ranked physicist
not really sure what you mean
I guess calling it a "game" is provocative or something, but you know it's not laws of nature and such
Lexicus
Deity
When I was born I shocked everyone the hospital room by saying the working class had nothing to lose but its chains
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Lohrenswald is the pearl presenter, not the kids crying inflation, to be clear
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
I was staunchly right liberal ("fiscal conservative" I guess) when I was 12-15. From around 15 I met people actually in poverty outside my family circle of really wealthy North Zealanders. Read the Communist Manifesto inspired by them and became a staunch follower of what I then thought was communism. (It wasn't, and I was an idiot.) I was very bright as a kid (in the abstract), could read anything and permanently remember it. (Had this ability until my illness robbed me of a proper memory.) However I was also very aware of this, being constantly told by adults, while having no social intelligence. So I was a teen iamverysmart; one gets defensive ablut the little they have. So I read Nietzsche and become hard social libertarian, hard left economic, and also staunchly anti-feminist. I think this is when I first had somewhat of a fully formed political identity.
I've since grown up from a lot of that, particularly understanding what feminism is and why it's good. It's a long and personal story there, my first encounter with feminism was very toxic, took me until university and new friends to learn how most feminists actually are, and that they actually want to work for the betterment of everyone, me included.
At the core of everything, I think it was good for me to both live in poverty and upper class as I formed some form of a political identity. Got me a good sense that the poor actually suffer problems, and wealthy upper classmen's primary daily concern is to what degree to waste money. :^)
I've since grown up from a lot of that, particularly understanding what feminism is and why it's good. It's a long and personal story there, my first encounter with feminism was very toxic, took me until university and new friends to learn how most feminists actually are, and that they actually want to work for the betterment of everyone, me included.
At the core of everything, I think it was good for me to both live in poverty and upper class as I formed some form of a political identity. Got me a good sense that the poor actually suffer problems, and wealthy upper classmen's primary daily concern is to what degree to waste money. :^)
Welcome to most of my life. There is exactly ONCE that I ever voted for the person/party who won, at least at provincial level. That was in 2015, when Alberta broke an 80-year run of right-wing government by electing the NDP.
The right-wing was back with a vengeance in 2019, "winning" by dubious means (the premier didn't even manage to legitimately win his party leadership without cheating, and fired the election commissioner whose job it was to investigate), and putting in a cabinet in which not one person was actually qualified for their portfolio. They have proceeded to make a mess of everything since then.
I have never had federal representation by anyone who cared about representing the entire constituency instead of only the people who voted for him/had party memberships.
Thread would be better with a poll
You're from NZ!? I always thought you were Swedish... or "similar".
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Zardnaar
Deity
Might be Dutch. North Zealand.
GenMarshall
Highborne Night Elven Ghost Agent
I'm very much embarrassed on my political journey. 😣
I know he's Danish. There's an island in Denmark called Zealand.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
AAAaaah!
Zardnaar
Deity
My country is named after a dutch province and has another countries flag on it
Very well done!
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
Quite happy about random Danish geography lessons in this thread 
Yea Zealand is a Danish island, in Danish Sjælland, literally Soul-Land. But probably not of that etymology. The Jutes call it The Devil's Island.
But yea point regardless is that in general North Zealand hosts some of the most high income areas outside the capital. I was born in a city that was half kids of lawyers and doctors, half slums.
Yea Zealand is a Danish island, in Danish Sjælland, literally Soul-Land. But probably not of that etymology. The Jutes call it The Devil's Island.
But yea point regardless is that in general North Zealand hosts some of the most high income areas outside the capital. I was born in a city that was half kids of lawyers and doctors, half slums.
My apologies for the confusion old friend. Its a hectic weekend here!
Lexicus
Deity
Okay, my real story is that I don't really have a discrete event that I can describe as a "political awakening." My parents were both liberal boomers, supported the civil rights movement, opposef vietnam, hated nixon and reagan, liked Clinton (didn't love him), were pissed that Bush won, and so on. I was predisposed to leftism and liberalism because I grew up in a house where the female parent was the breadwinner and the male parent was the at-home caregiver, and my mom was active in her union and held elected office in it more than once.
I learned about slavery, the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement in elementary school and I always thought liberalism was about stopping all that from happening again, and that conservatism basically led back toward the worst parts of history.
I was politically aware, and a lib, as a middle schooler...I guess like Hygro, I was against the Iraq War from as early as I can remember, but I thought America was good, markets were good and inevitable, etc, etc. I even supported capital punishment then! I spent a lot of time learning about science and in particular evolution in order to own creationists online.
In eighth grade everything changed for me. I met a guy from Venezuela (another 8th grader who moved to my town) who was into leftist as opposed to liberal politics, and I embraced communism and radical politics pretty hard, but I'd say it was more an aesthetic and that I was still pretty much a lib, but I was definitely on the left side of liberalism from then on...and in college I learned about other kinds of radical politics and became a more serious anarchist, attended meetings and stuff, did some student activism...all pretty small potatoes of course.
In college learning about post-keynesian economics and employee ownership/cooperative enterprise also informed those politics. Before that I had believed that Obama's bank bailouts were necessary, but learning about post-keynesianism made me see that Obama was a tool for the finance industry no less than Bush had been. I don't think I've ever really gone back from that understanding and I seem to get further left the older I get and the more I see.
I learned about slavery, the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement in elementary school and I always thought liberalism was about stopping all that from happening again, and that conservatism basically led back toward the worst parts of history.
I was politically aware, and a lib, as a middle schooler...I guess like Hygro, I was against the Iraq War from as early as I can remember, but I thought America was good, markets were good and inevitable, etc, etc. I even supported capital punishment then! I spent a lot of time learning about science and in particular evolution in order to own creationists online.
In eighth grade everything changed for me. I met a guy from Venezuela (another 8th grader who moved to my town) who was into leftist as opposed to liberal politics, and I embraced communism and radical politics pretty hard, but I'd say it was more an aesthetic and that I was still pretty much a lib, but I was definitely on the left side of liberalism from then on...and in college I learned about other kinds of radical politics and became a more serious anarchist, attended meetings and stuff, did some student activism...all pretty small potatoes of course.
In college learning about post-keynesian economics and employee ownership/cooperative enterprise also informed those politics. Before that I had believed that Obama's bank bailouts were necessary, but learning about post-keynesianism made me see that Obama was a tool for the finance industry no less than Bush had been. I don't think I've ever really gone back from that understanding and I seem to get further left the older I get and the more I see.
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Farm Boy
Useless, useless.
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2010
- Messages
- 24,563
Dad hollered from the living room while I was dinking around on the computer. "Come here, right now!" You know the tone of voice. The one that is utterly sincere. It's the one you use when somebody is having a heart attack. People around can tell. I ran in and The Wall was coming down. I was 8. Andre Dawson, Leon Durham, and Harry Caray were my heroes. Probably in that order.
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I suppose my political awakening started when I was about 6, I was a curious kid and my parents/grandparents bought/gave me non-fiction books about various different countries from a young age, plus there were lots of newspapers in the house. As soon as I learned to read, my favourite thing to read was the international news and op-ed section of the papers. The most prominent columnist at the time was a sort of left-wing Russophile. At the same time, my grandfather gave me a book about Tibet. Consequently 6-year-old TK became a Tibetan nationalist with nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
I grew up for the first 10 years of my life in Thailand, which meant indoctrination into the state royal cult started in early childhood. A side effect of how this was done was that young children were taught lots of different facts about the world, so that they are aware of how hard the royals were working to solve all of the world's problems. And while the royals could not be openly criticised, everyone and everything else was fair game. Admittedly I was an anomaly in how eagerly I took to political things, but I reckon I need to point out that the way young Thai schoolchildren were taught might also have something to do with it.
By about 12 I've pretty much formed all of the basic political opinions that I still hold today. Different things get emphasised and de-emphasised over the years as I read more widely and learned which sources to trust or distrust, but drill down to fundamentals of the kind of society I want to live in, not much has changed since back then.
I grew up for the first 10 years of my life in Thailand, which meant indoctrination into the state royal cult started in early childhood. A side effect of how this was done was that young children were taught lots of different facts about the world, so that they are aware of how hard the royals were working to solve all of the world's problems. And while the royals could not be openly criticised, everyone and everything else was fair game. Admittedly I was an anomaly in how eagerly I took to political things, but I reckon I need to point out that the way young Thai schoolchildren were taught might also have something to do with it.
By about 12 I've pretty much formed all of the basic political opinions that I still hold today. Different things get emphasised and de-emphasised over the years as I read more widely and learned which sources to trust or distrust, but drill down to fundamentals of the kind of society I want to live in, not much has changed since back then.
This was true for me for quite a few years. My family was an anomaly - supporting Pierre Trudeau's Liberals while living in Central Alberta (this is, and always has been, right-wing territory as far as who gets elected federally and most times provincially).
I've changed parties a couple of times over the years when I felt I could no longer support the Liberals. But I have never voted for anything calling itself Conservative or pretending to be the legitimate successor to them.
