Voted 'no' now that I am 26; this did not happen. (But in fact I did stay on it until age 22: after this point health insurance was covered by a scholarship, and then after graduating law school I got it through my current job. So if not for Obamacare I would indeed have had to seek probably-expensive private insurance between summer 2018 and summer 2019).
Found this thread while looking for something else and searching for myself in BRTD's posts, which dug up some pretty funny stuff from the 2012 cycle.
Duh. But I'm sure that when he does it, it will be different for some reason.
as I believe I said in IRC, Vosem appears so absurd because he explicitly states what are meant only to be the implicit tenets of neoliberal ideology.
(The specific thing being argued here is dumb and is just me at 15 reading something in a stupid way, but I found this quote, all the way back from 2012, pretty interesting, because I definitely do still talk like this -- when the subject is politics, in a way meant to highlight my differences with whoever is speaking -- and those on the economic left find the directness of my tone very strange.)
It's fascinating the extent, when I look at old threads, that younger Republican-leaning posters from before 2017 or so virtually all became more left-wing when they got older, sometimes to
absurd degrees (like MasterJedi going from an insane Republican hack to an insane Democratic hack without skipping a beat), but after 2017-2018 or so this seems to have dissipated. This thread takes it for granted that that process would happen to me, and in fact that was a pretty safe assumption at the time, but it didn't happen: I thought most of outcomes of neoliberalism that get criticized were good in 2012, and I still think so in 2023. There were a few years in there, around 2016-2018, where I was less sure of this, but I never abandoned it and since finishing undergrad I've clearly moved back towards the economic right.
Makes me wonder, of the young posters we have now, who will still think basically the same things in 11 years, and who will drift away, whether because their beliefs are determined by the society they're in or because they're just trying ideologies and are not certain of anything. I cringe at a lot of my posts from 2012 nowadays, but at least
directionally I still agree with the vast majority.