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.
Death penalty carceral state - carceral state - state -
state
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.
Obviously, it varies, but a thing often happens where as you’re exposed to the details of how the world works (in person) you start to realise the generations who came before and made it weren’t total idiots.
Thinking it all makes sense isn’t where that goes, but “a monopoly on the use of force is probably necessary” or “markets are more airtight than people think” can be.
Speak for yourself. All kinds of groups from conservatives to liberals to fascists to communists (although let’s be honest, it’s mostly the conservatives and liberals and ‘enlightened centrists’) love to arrogantly imply that their current worldview is the mature, rational conclusion that any intelligent person should reach in adulthood, and any other is just childish, naive, and poorly conceived. The people who do this aren’t speaking to anything concrete about the world, they’re just high on their own farts and confident in their ignorance.
And it’s the anarchists who catch the bulk of the sneering insults from these types, who will often demonstrate their own ignorance as they dismiss them as naive and uninformed. You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
Oh? Which ideology on that list the push for, then? I’m in the picture, I used to agree with OP on a lot and now I agree on less, but can you even guess how?
Nothing is being sold here, I literally just listed a couple anarchist things OP believes. Learning as you get older is a real phenomenon, at least for most people. And, there’s no shortage of older people who have more complex, less absolute ideas about any number of things than they did when they were younger.
You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
I used a different word on purpose, because capitalism doesn’t really have a consistent definition. According to Hexbear, China isn’t capitalist despite having all the associated features, for example.
Alright, I’ll have a go at guessing your ideology since you asked. Given your status quo preference (“the generations before us aren’t stupid and things are the way they are for a good reason”), you’re not a radical so that leaves conservative, liberal, or centrist. Given you’ve implied that you used to have some anarchist beliefs it’s unlikely you went from that to conservative, so most likely you’re some flavor of liberal, like a social democrat. You’re vaguely sympathetic to some socialist and anarchist ideas but think you’re too smart to commit to them because the world is “just more complicated than that.” Capitalist realism has pulled you back from becoming a radical as you’ve gotten older.
Actually, you pretty much nailed it, nice. TBF that makes it kind of a trick question, since it’s not neatly in any of the categories.
Do you think the world isn’t complicated? Even anarchists usually do. If anything, you see the argument that the world is too complicated to be reduced to numbers and laws.
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.
I was raised conservative, back-country compound with apocalypse preppers, homeschooling, israel prophecy, the whole nine yards. I was raised with The 700 Club and Rush Limbaugh playing every day and night.
I read science books that distant family members managed to smuggle to me in gift boxes alongside other “safe” books like Kid’s bibles, I learned more and more about the world around me, I started collecting my own book collection and just read and read and read, and the doubts started to grow, uneasy, shameful, scary-as-fuck doubts.
But the big turn happened when I got out of there, and America started one it’s many wars and I was watching FOX news cover it. A humvee passes a civilian box truck and shredded it to pieces with an automatic grenade launcher. Probably a family trying to escape the city… cut to the host, smiling and praising America’s might, and that’s when it hit me: We’re the bad guys.
A few more things really sealed it, when I had friends start to come back from these conflicts in boxes, or a couple guys I knew who blew their own brains out after coming home. I still despair at these horrific wastes of life and I can’t figure out why more people don’t see life as precious. How fucking stupid do you have to be to justify war, murder and causing destruction to society.
And America is doing it again. While I think Iran’s government is even more evil, a war is not the right thing to do.
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.
The main problem with nuclear power is that it’s the most expensive form of electricity. People who say otherwise are only looking at the cost of running the generator, rather than including all the true costs involved in generating each watt, which is called the “Levelized Cost Of Electricity” (LCOE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
So there’s no reason to build any new nuclear generators now that renewables+storage are the cheapest form of electricity, and are also the easiest and fastest to build.
I know nuclear is expensive, but power generation isn’t the only reason to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plants basically prop up nuclear science. Without nuclear power plants, you’re hampering the chances of discovering a breakthrough that could lead to cheaper nuclear energy. And you’re pushing back the timeline on fusion.
Also, medical isotopes used for cancer treatments are created in nuclear reactors.
fusion is a pipe dream at this point; nuclear physics has been so thoroughly researched through CERN and other organizations that it’s utterly unlikely that any big break-throughs are gonna happen anytime in the next 100 years.
the only optimization that could still happen is in the reactor design, that is, in everything except the nuclear physics part. stuff like how do you build cheaper plumbing through a 1 m thick concrete wall … not really exciting stuff.
This doesn’t seem like a good argument. More research into renewable and storage technology can also lead to interesting discoveries useful in other fields.
I’m curious how SMRs will end up affecting overall cost of nuclear as well. Once we get into a unit that can be mass produced rather than tailor making each site, I could see the line going down at least a bit and would also allow us to keep pushing those boundaries.
I used to be strictly against nuclear energy until like 2025 or so.
I recently looked into it again due to a school project and realized that nuclear energy is actually fine. Renewable energy is still better but nuclear energy is fine. The biggest problem with nuclear energy is high cost; And renewable energy is just nuclear energy with the most difficult parts outsourced (to the sun).
I used to believe the centrist idea that America needs a strong Republican Party and a strong Democratic Party.
The GOP actively calls all democrats and liberals enemies, demons, terrorists, etcetera while giving the billionaires all on our public wealth, tax breaks and subsidies.
America does not need the GOP at all.
One issue with this is both are right of center.
And exist in a system that can only support two parties, which means that the most effective strategy is not to convince voters that your pictures are superior but to convince them not to vote for the other party. Cue a race to the bottom.
You’re basically down to 0 strong parties. And really 2 is a minimum, since if there’s more, the other parties can just go around any one or two that are being dumb.
The GOP put itself on the fascist downward spiral when the Federalist society took over.
The Democrats started their slow decline when they put Truman as FDR’s VP. Pushing out the left wing part of the party that gave it massive electoral power for a generation.
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
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.
You weren’t wrong on that. You just didn’t realize that most people really suck, and sucky people being able to connect easily results in gestures widely.
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.
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
i still think that the people commonly referred to as being “on the right” are reasonable people overall; Just that they use a very different axiomatic system to make reasonings on. If you start with very different goals, of course you can get to very different conclusions. That’s not a logic error though, it’s just a different set of goals.
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.
Bojler eladó !
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.
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.
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…
( :
_ /\ _
Yeah because Japanese companies like Toyota, Sony and Panasonic don’t exploit their employees.
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Israel was justified in their (initial) retaliation for October 7.
Gone so far in the other direction that I now firmly believe Israel should be wiped off the fucking map. Decades of propaganda convinced me they weren’t violent colonizers.
Fuck Israel. From the river to the sea.
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I thought the same until I found out Isreal had killed Palestinian protesters. Then of course Gaza.
Fuck Isreal and all it’s bullshit.
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.
The US
Used to make fun of small cars and “ricers”. Now I have like 3 of them and hate large vehicles.
The irony there being you now have more car than just a single large vehicle. Although you won’t be driving more than one at once.
1 person who buys a new car (especially anything large) is wasting far far more than I am with my 15 year old cars. I don’t believe in throwaway culture. Plus I hate new cars so there’s that.
I’ll also add that I’m not a menace on the road like Karen road raging in her 8000 lb suv
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.
