I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
In high school, I was pro-death penalty. As part of a class on politics, I was randomly assigned the anti-death penalty position to research and debate on. I very quickly changed my opinion when I learned about the systemic racism involved. Now I’m an anarchist
That escalated randomly.
I think I’m starting to lean that way as well, I definitely understand society and norms are an illusion of structure, but I used to think it was good, productive, now I think that theater is hurting us.
When people stop working towards the structure and begin to exploit it instead…
yep exactly. I really am just wondering how much this is recent failures or has it just always been this fucked up and we were sold lies growing up.
Don’t worry, when you graduate high school you’ll drop the anarchist bit, too.
Because grown ups are capitalists ?
Nah, it’s just that eventually you realize there is more to life that questioning your parents and wearing black.
Edit: Don’t worry, you can still circle your As.
oh look, it’s someone who doesn’t know what anarchism is
I know what anarchism is and I think it a utopian thought experiment.
Let me guess, you use Linux?
what gave it away, the website I’m on or the posts I made?
I didn’t even look at your post history. It’s just that Linux users and defenders of Anarchism as a true system of power have a very narrow Venn diagram.
whatever. I’m not interested in discussing anything with someone this caustic. I didn’t say “humanity must become anarchists” I said “you don’t know what anarchy is”
And I’m not interested in having a conversation with someone who can’t even pick a side of the fence to argue from. I hear the Libertarians are recruiting, maybe they are more your flavor.
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I used to be anti-nuclear energy until I learned a bunch of science and engineering behind it. Turns out things are less scary when you know more about them.
Edit: I also learned that it’s okay, and usually preferable, to not have a strong opinion about things that you don’t know about.
Frankly, the second one is the bigger deal.
Israel.
I thought it was complicated but they had a right to the land because of the holocaust, that countries around them should learn to get along with Israel
Now I know founding Israel was a mistake. Explicitly saying it’s a Jewish state will inevitably lead to other groups being suppressed, i.e. Apartheid if not outright genocide. And they are not hated in the region because Muslims and Jews cannot get along, but because Israel was built entirely on stolen land, and they are still in the process of stealing more and genocide those who stand in their way
This is mine, as well. I used to abhor anything negative about Israel. Now I am the one saying presumed abhorrent things.
It does help explain why people can be anti immigrant. Just look at what the “immigrant” Israelis are doing to the native Palestinians…
(I’m not anti immigrant)
True, but let’s make extra clear that Palestinian resistance is completely different than typical western anti immigrant sentiment. There have been Jews, Christians and Muslims living there for centuries. The problem is not that Jews live there or even that many of them moved there at once. It’s that Israelis set up their own government where native population literally have fewer rights
Conservatism. Used to be a conservative around being 18-20. Then I left it after I saw what giving 2/3rd of the seats to Orbán did in my country. Now I’m not only an anti-fascist, but I also actively oppose conservatism.
When we thought fascism would never come back, we had to learn fascism was just conservatism at its logical extremes.
Sounds like you’ve seen the worst conservatives have to offer.
It’s sad because there are perfectly sane and decent conservatives all around who aren’t out to break the whole system or aggravate you. They just want lower taxes/regulation.
To me, lowering taxes and lessening regulations sounds like “We don’t want to break the whole system or aggravate you. We just want to make the system worse and make life harder for people who don’t have money”.
The way I see it is that we could have lower taxes for working class people by taxing the rich more and reducing corporate welfare. We wouldn’t even have to compromise on our systems. If you’re in favour of those, that’s awesome – I haven’t met very many conservatives who think that way.
But what’s wrong with regulations? Regulations are what stop corporations from cutting corners on health and safety in the name of profits. And we can see from practices around the world that not only does violating these tend NOT to sway public opinion enough that businesses will stop doing harmful things, but they will knowingly do these things and cause harm to people who couldn’t have known any better beforehand.
Nah that’s not credible any more.
All those people lined right up behind Trump as soon as they got the chance.
That Trumpers can be reasoned with and redeemed.
I held this belief until Jan 6th, but I’ve only felt more validated that Trump supporters are fundamentally irredeemable monsters who should be treated like hostile terrorists rather than fellow citizens.
I lost that when a family member looked me in the face and told me that flu shots are called “flu shots” because they aren’t actually vaccines. We are in a psychic war, and we are losing
Used to make fun of small cars and “ricers”. Now I have like 3 of them and hate large vehicles.
The US
I grew up with this type of Toilet.
Seated toilets were harder to shit in and I didn’t like them at first, but bidet is a formidable upgrade to hand so I like seated toilets more now.
Oh also I used to be a Matt Walsh fan in highschool and now I hate sexists and overall fascism supporters including my old self with disgust.
This is the right approach.
Our ancestors didn’t have chairs-like places to take a shit, they just used any flat ground and did it on the ground, it doesn’t really make sense to be in a sit position, it’s counter-evolutive.
Ok do you squat to poop? You’re not just pooping standing up right?
Yeah that’s a squat pot.
Question for you: I used one of these in Istanbul airport. In a residential building that doesn’t have a meter or more between the floors, is the bathroom only on the ground floor? If I installed one of these on the upper floor in my house, the bowl would stick out of the ceiling of the room below.
To my understanding, apartment or office buildings actually have quite a bit of space between floors. Not a meter, but more than enough.
The drain pipe of the shitter can be embedded in the floor in some cases, even with seated toilets.
Homophobia was the norm where I grew up in the '80s and '90s. Took me until the late '90s to start questioning that, and probably a year or two more to become completely cleansed of it.
That people are smart.
Most people are abject morons who still believe in Iron Age mythology.
At one point I really, truly believed that the internet and social media would be a turning point in human interconnectivity and cultural understanding. The ability to just… talk to someone on the other side of the planet, at will? When we know that exposure to other beliefs and cultures is superb at punching holes in hatred and misunderstanding? Surely this would lead to great things!
Yeah, that was a miss.
Exposure to other is still a fantastic way to grow understanding. But the internet and social media were not a highway to it, and as the “wild west” era of the internet faded and we instead got corporate-governed, algorithm-driven siloization of views, my views on the value of social media changed sharply.
I remember when scrolling through Facebook, all I saw was updates on my friends and family and pages I chose to follow. Now my feed is full of random posts from pages I didn’t ask to see posts from but the algorithm decided I should.
I used to believe capitalism could work if it was just done right.
I still believe that, but we also have to accept that it never actually will.
It could work in a vacuum with a perfectly spherical populace, for instance.
It absolutely can work, so long as it isn’t allowed to run the show: harnessed, constrained, controlled capitalism, with no concentration-of-wealth-archy machiavellianism, can work.
But to do that, then you have to make the pay-ladder be proportionate to difficulty-to-replace, & not a means of “legal” embezzling, you have to make accounting unbreakable ( blockchain, ALL entries getting into an Algorand-type blockchain that all businesses in the economy & the gov’t all have servers participating in ), you have to make Human Capital Investment ( NOT consumable-human-resources: wrong model/paradigm! ) work properly, etc, etc, etc.
A Japanese keiretsu is an example of a semi-autonomous-economy which proves that capitalism can work ( capitalism works within the keiretsu ), & Toyota is a vertical-keiretsu ( profit-efficient ) & Panasonic, Sony, etc, are horizontal-keiretsu ( marketsaturation efficient ).
Another problem is that market-speculators, like those “candlesticks market-timing” people, enforce market-volatility, as a means of harvesting money from others, & that is an antipattern.
Worker-owned-business is the bedrock of it, too…
which unions & political-ideologues hate…
Put ownership, accountability, responsibility, & authority, all unitary!
Anyways, there are ways of making it work, but I think it’s just too … “Japanese” ( in terms of how thorough the management-paradigm has to be, to even understand the system ) … for any Western-mind to think of it properly.
No matter: soon a not-for-profit will begin demonstrating how this all works, later this year, I think…
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Yeah because Japanese companies like Toyota, Sony and Panasonic don’t exploit their employees.
That the world was ran by a cabal of evil people, genuinely thought it was mostly conspiracy theory and it wasn’t so organized and fucked up. How naive.
Maybe tying the power structure of the West to financial shell games, drug running, and child sex parties was not a good long term strategy.
Eating meat. I used to vaguely mock vegans when I was in college (UK, so 16-18 years old). I used to say shit like “don’t you just miss bacon though” and “the animals already dead, you might as well eat it now or it goes to waste”. I’ve since done a 180 and I’m close to 10 years of veganism. Best decision I ever made for both my health and mental wellbeing.
My stepson’s family is vegan. My thought is some of it is good, most of it is depressing.
I could probably do vegetarian but no fucking way I’m giving up butter and cheese.
I have butter and cheese most days, they just happen to be vegan instead of dairy based
Margarine is essentially vegan and a pretty ok substitute. I’ve had vegan butter that was also not terrible. Country crock makes some plant based cream that I actually very much like whipped cream from. My wife makes this stabilized whipped cream (think cream and instant pudding) that is absolutely amazing. Now cheese… that’s a totally different story. It always tastes like plastic to me. And don’t get me started on cream cheese. My wife tried to make a vegan cheese cake once. Let’s just say it didn’t go so well.
What made it easy for me to change to vegan cheese was realising that there’re so many different varieties of cheese that all taste different to each other, and realising that vegan cheese is just more amongst them, each also tasting different between them.
That and at the time of me making the transition my local supermarket had a vegan wensleydale and cranberries which has always been my favourite cheese. So having an alternative for that made it much easier for me.
This is very true.
they just happen to be vegan
Yeah, that’s not butter and cheese what you’re eating… No need to lie to us.
That shit never tastes like the actual product. And it’s completely fine if you don’t want to eat it for whatever reason, but don’t lie.
