Do you remember the things that are mostly responsible for turning you into a radical?

Stokely carmichaels talk with Commander George Lincoln Rockwell really opened my eyes.

Well, it started slowly in this political discussion group for young people in Norway, which is unproportionally filled with communists and anarchists relative to the rest of the population. At first I countered them with the standard "looks good on paper" blabla, etc, but sometimes they would give me statistics that I simply couldn't refute. How millions are starving, dying, how income inequality is growing, how we have more houses than homeless people, how we have more capacity than unemployed, and after a while my curiosity just pushed me to start reading Marx.

I've gotten through the Manifesto but, admittedly, Das Kapital is a tough read considering how much I have to do at school and shit as well. Getting there.

Julia McFucking Shindel?

I've seen some exciting signs, though. Some people in the Holla Forums infested facebook group />politics/ started saying they would contemplate revolution if Clinton was elected. Granted, these people don't want socialism, but I think some working class folks are going to be more acceptable towards leftist thought in a matter of years. We just have to keep educating, familios

i went on /mu/ and got more into music, then i heard crass and that was how i found out that anarchism wasn't just survival of the fittest, i also found out about the CNT because of that, doing more research into it

You sound like me.
For me it was for blocking traffic. Not as strong a gesture as yours I'll admit, but they still had a fucking issue with it. And with cursing. The racial and idpol shit, and the insularity and petty gossip and drama that was like unto an IRC circlejerk. I put up with it for months because muh suffering for the cause muh earning their trust and muh be the bigger man before I finally left after most of the other semi-decent people had been driven out and it turned into the PFJ from The Life of Brian.
For me it was winter gear.
For me that was this board and I'm still learning the ropes. We had some local socialists but they had significant idpol issues.

Thanks, me too.

'Fraid not.

Haha, you're right, our experiences do sound really similar.

I think that's a pretty strong gesture. I'd suggested doing that to the "Occupy" group but they shot it down because "we don't want to inconvenience potential supporters."

Yeah, that sounds about right. At the time I didn't know any better, so I kind of went lone-wolf on the hunger strike because I didn't want whatever might happen because of it to reflect poorly on the group. Not a single one of them came to visit me while I was out there or offer any sort of support. Instead they just kvetched about me on facebook saying stuff like "What does this white boy know about hunger?" Which at the time I thought was pretty funny because the woman in charge must have had a good thirty to forty pounds on me.

Whew, hat's off to you. I can't imagine putting up with it for that long. After my sit-in, I basically abandoned the Occupy group because by then I'd met several actual leftists that were interested in doing more than holding up signs. Ultimately nothing came of either, but in retrospect I wish I had gotten to know the leftists better and kept up with them afterward, especially the anarcho-communist that wanted to get a Kapital reading group together.

Same and same. Occupy was when I met them in the flesh, but I didn't get really immersed in it until leftypol because of various personal issues. When I was starting to explore leftism again, users on reddit directed me to a local chapter of the socialist party but that nearly turned me off too because the chapter president was deep in tumblr-tier idpol that I had little interest in. Luckily I found Holla Forums and actual leftists that spent more time talking about leftism rather than riding their spooky hobby horses.

Heuy Freeman started me on my path to tin foil acid fueled revolution

I think I've always just preferred taking the challenging route as opposed to the easy one, and I've secretly been contemptuous of people who trumpet their ability to succeed at shooting fish in a barrel as proof of their superiority. Realizing a socialist society definitely qualifies, and capitalists and their ilk who love to show off the scraps they got for renting their lives out to Porky to me are the weakest and most fragile people of all.

It has always been obvious to me since at least high school that economic disadvantage was the greatest force in people's lives. I've also always admired guys like Ralph Nader willing to go out and spread the inconvenient truth with no hope of winning. Then Gamergate happened and people starting spreading around that so obviously-phony "Cultural Marxism" idiocy and I took it upon myself to finally read up on this stuff.