I became a leftist by trying to apply consistency to my morals. If equal opportunity for all is the goal, there is no other option.

Because a better world is not just possible, but necessary. My background is in philosophy of science and, in particular, climate science. I spent a couple of years after my PhD working in a climate modeling lab, and it was just an incredibly radicalizing experience. We have this huge problem that's going to kill billions of people if we don't do something. We know exactly what we need to do to fix that problem, and yet everything about the way society is organized is arrayed to stop us from making even the most basic progress toward that goal. Capitalism is a death cult that's going to kill us all unless we stop it.

The other big part of it is empathy. Nobody--not the meanest, laziest asshole--deserves to live without dignity. Capitalism is set up to encourage us to step on each other to get to the top, and tells us that dignity only comes to those who "earn it" by being ruthless enough to make it. In reality, though, it mostly comes down to luck. Any system that assigns human dignity by lottery and then encourages the lottery winners to look down on the losers and talk about how they earned their place deserves to be burned to the fucking ground.

Long history of leftists in my family dating back to the late 1800's. Flirted with right-wing nationalism briefly before pivoting back to leftism. Talking to indigenous groups and seeing more of US imperialism in my country cemented my turn back to the left.

i'm a robot that survives by burning cop cars

The ideal value at the core of my being for as long as I remember has been: "Be excellent to each other."

In my teens as I began to become aware of myself as a political actor I adopted libertarianism because the problem was that the government was getting in everyone's business and preventing everyone from being excellent to each other. In my 20s I started to grow up to the fact that there are some bad actors who don't want to be excellent to each other and that the system can only work if you have rules and mechanisms in place that will ensure people have to be a minimum amount of excellent to each other. In my 30s the illusion finally broke and I came to the conclusion that the system itself not only encourages but indeed is built on exploitation and will never allow anyone to truly be excellent to each other. I'm still working on educating myself both in theory and history and am largely embarrassed but for all my frustration with the world leftist ideals have given me more moral clarity and confidence in how I view the world than I ever have and I don't feel the same kind of maddening anxiety trying to square circles I always did as a lib.

I had a whole half baked diatribe typed out about getting my first real job and having to confront the fact that reality was not what I was taught, that theorizing about "minimalist" forms of government didn't put food on the table, that even before that there were cracks because of how I felt about healthcare, etc., but I deleted it all because I think it can all be said much simpler.

I grew up.

The education system fucked up by emphasizing critical thinking skills in the late 90s and early 2000s just before invading Iraq and allowing plutocrats to outright loot and pillage the economy.

I get and agree with your point about health insurance in the US, but it's such a vastly and purposefully evil construct that it ends up being cartoonish when you start trying to compare it to other "financial institutions" out there. Like, we could just do away with health insurance and have national healthcare, and it wouldn't really disrupt daily life except for the people working in and adjacent to that industry.

The same can't be said for banks, for example. So it's important not to generalize too broadly.

As far as LTV goes, I've been a proponent of that for a relatively long time (in Internet time). But "mainstream" economists are still very much opposed to it. I think because they (purposely?) misinterpret it as a forward looking valuation. In other words, if the value of labor is $X/hr, then LTV says the price will only ever be materials + labor. But they see in the market that prices move by supply and demand. They can't reconcile it.

But LTV should be applied backward. You find the price in the market via supply and demand, then subtract the cost of materials (this should include transport, warehousing, everything not labor). What's left is the "value added."

Most economists want that "value added" to be a magical property inherent to the finished product. But it's not. We know it's not, and not just because magic isn't real. We know it's not because without the labor the added value wouldn't be there. It's both necessary and sufficient to explain the value added.

The other problem obviously is the owners. They pay the economists to maintain the position that value is magical.

As far as leftism... Anarchism probably isn't practical in the short or medium term. Power is too concentrated. And assholes still exist. Democratic, representative government that empowers some armed authorities to protect people from violence will be necessary for a long time with humans as we are. So laws and regulations will be required. Oversight will be required.

In the short term we should pursue more and more socialism in our government. Socialize medicine, food, housing. Make sure the people who do work get the majority of the value created by their labor (determined by the market price of the finished good). This will be best accomplished by strong unions, preferably just as international as the corporations they're bargaining against.

I can see the most extreme leftist paradise as a potential outcome in a few thousand years, but it will take steps to get there.

I had no choice, I was born on International Workers Day

I'm not a big politics guy. Mostly I'm worried about ethics in gaming, television, and film journalism

former subject of a soviet MKULTRA-like experiment

My parents instilled in me the values of fairness, justice, and caring for other people. I didn't follow those values very well growing up, or in young adulthood, but later in life I've become more serious about them. And if you're serious about those values, you yearn for a better political and economic system for the world.

I was used to be a liberal, and in college had my libertarian phase. The libertarian phase came purely out of selfishness (I wanted a society that would unleash me). The liberal phases came from what I now recognize was kind of a deep-seated complacency with the Existing System. Things were working out okay for me, and all of the propaganda said that the existing neo-liberal system was the best and only system that could create durable Economic Growth here (and it raised billions out of poverty, so I didn't have to worry about what was going on Over There). The turning point for me was really was when my work took me out of the office and onto the factory floor, and got me to interact for months at a time with people outside of my social and professional bubble. It really made me question my perspective about whether our society was fundamentally fair and just.

That got me listening to Chapo, and then interacting with leftist shitposting, and then watching youtube videos about Marxism. But I think the ultimate turning point for me was actually slogging through Capital vol 1, which was so perspective-changing that it's almost like a mental false vacuum decay. I have a hard time even talking with people about economics in non-marxist terms anymore, because to use the conventional language seems like masque.

I'm a Conservative. I believe in preserving old fashioned leninist values

. I grew up poor and so did my closest friends, I had undocumented friends too but that didnt really communicate the unfairness in the world, I was Prager-radio raised conservative. I just thought everywhere was like where I grew up.

When I went to music school and started to see more of the world and and saw how behind I was I realized that no, not everywhere is the same. First, I thought there was something wrong with me, I have a mentally ill mother and I think being raised as a conservative made me a little unsocialable ontop of that. I can recognize someone with a similar upbringing very easily.

Then I realized the thread of all the people around me being white instead of brown, then it was the money aspect. I was getting drowned in student debt and they werent paying their way.

I realized that these guys didnt go to a school that wasnt weather treated, where there was multiple gang fights everyday outside the non gang ones, or have classes where the students completely ruled the class.

I follow my gut feelings

All of the dysfunction in the American system compared to the (still quite dysfunctional, but somehow less so) Canadian system really calls into question American narratives.