So, in my circles of friends, I am the most terminally online person. I remember being a soc-demmy kinda person (who called themselves socialist) when I joined r/cth when it hit 69,420 members.
Now here I am with opinions like "Stalin and the USSR weren't so bad" and "The tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 were correct, actually". I feel like the community here on hexbear has kinda shifted in the same way. That said, we've steered clear of the patsoc menace, who aesthetically venerate AES while following the most regressive social/nationalist opinions of what they think of as the working class.
This has somewhat put me at odds with a lot of my RL friends, who are anarchists or trots of varying degrees. I'm generally not down with getting into spats with said RL friends, so I keep a lot of my opinions to myself. This is especially onerous with opinions about the Ukraine war.
How did I end up here? How did we..? I remember back on r/cth the line "This is enough to turn me into a tankie", or some such thing, as though being a tankie was just socialism + willingness to use violence to achieve it.
I can remember online anarchists posting fairly high profile Ls that I think split actual anarchists and left-liberals who just liked to call themselves anarchists (and now online anarchists who really like NATO? idk). But those events had a lot of people shy away from the anarchist label and kinda mull about their own beliefs. The main ones off the top of my head were CHAZ, Vaush audience watchers, and the anti-work breakdown. Certainly, I remember r/cth being a lot more awash with anarchist rhetoric and population (claimed or otherwise) than hexbear currently is.
I don't want this to be a sectarian rant session, but more a reflection of political journeys from r/cth's medicare for all socdem position to the current vibes of hexbear, both personal and pontifications of why this shift occurred.
This isn't the be-all and end-all of my thoughts of my own political evolution. I'll comment some more as I think of them (in between cleaning for rent inspection)
most people are unironic NPCs who literally don't fucking know anything
to people who know basic things, incredibly popular statements like "China is responsible for global warming" is like saying 2 + 2 = -89347
when you realize how utterly depraved, mindless, and reality-denying the average frothing-at-the-mouth english-speaker on the internet is, you naturally begin to question all the other assumptions that you absorbed just by being in their vicinity.
One of the most common traits among those people is an unexamined belief that they are the epic hero in their own story, that everyone else is the "NPC," and that they are too logical and rational to be susceptible to psychological manipulation.
It's much better to know that you're vulnerable to psychological manipulation and curate your intake of propaganda accordingly.