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.
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 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 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.
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 wasn’t a supporter of euthanasia until I worked in a residential aged care facility.
That’s dark. People really do just be putting their parents in those buildings to die, aren’t they?
I used to be excited and optimistic about new technologies. Now I’m just jaded.
I used to eat mostly plants. Ended up with NAFLD, had to change my diet entirely.
Google, Reddit, etc. are good. Now I know the horrors and they are obviously our worst enemies.
That we don’t need school and it’s useless. I used to not like going to school when I was younger. Now I love it and look forward to almost every day, especially now that this is my last year in high school.
Google once had the Slogan “dont be evil” but not anymore.
Yeah I used to love google. They were the plucky upstart disrupting the microsoft ecosystem.
Used to be that Google offered applications and services that rivaled or surpassed the established pay-for alternatives. Now… FOSS is the new Google, Google is the new Microsoft, and Microsoft is innovating a whole new category of shitty and ubiquitous slopware.
Nah, FOSS isn’t the new google.
It’s a normal part of a market cycle that a cheeky upstart, a disruptor, will enter with less inertia and a fresh approach. Inevitably they become the incumbent with the same problems as those they displaced.
I think FOSS holds the same position it always has - low cost, generally low “perceived” quality. However, as the higher perceived quality brands become hostile to users regarding privacy and features like AI, that perception of quality around FOSS is changing, but not to an extent that’s significant in the market.
What I mean is, FOSS has become an appealing option to you and I because we care about privacy. In general though FOSS is in the same position it always has been.
I was raised conservative, back-country compound with apocalypse preppers, 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.
God it’s awkward now to look back but I used to vote conservative.
There’s a phrase here “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, referring to people who vote for policies that benefit wealth people because they identify as a wealthy person even though they are absolutely not. That was me.
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.
So many of them. So, so many.
Maybe the only one I’ve kept perfectly intact is my belief that the golden rule is prime.
I was raised a young earth creationist, picketed abortion clinics when I was elementary school aged but don’t worry I was home schooled from kindergarten through high school. Was basically a republican/libertarian until about 2015 when my spiritual leaders, including and especially my parents, began to compromise all of their values.
More recently, probably even until 2020, I viewed myself as an aspiring centrist.
Now I’m an agnostic atheist who is seeing how far left the political spectrum goes, and I still think centrism is a nice idea, in a totally different world than the one we live in, with a totally different meaning to “center”.
Here is the thing I should disclose though, because I suspect it applies to a lot of things.
I was raised steeped in a level of bigotry that was all-encompassing but cloaked in Christian love.
I have intellectually separated myself from that bigotry, but I believe I still have instinctive/subconscious/unidentified bigotries to work through.
I am trying to be very conscious of that as I make my way in the world, trying to love my neighbor as myself, and trying to continuously expand the definition of “neighbor”.
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.
I mean, a functional democracy has two strong parties minimum. You’re basically down to 0.
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.
Used to be an apple fanboy, now I use linux, grapheneos, and self host
I sadly use Instagram to chat with friends. Don’t use Reddit anymore. Self hosting is something I want to get into but I don’t have time to be a DIY system admin with 0 training right now.
What did you do about WhatsApp?
Signal is great for texting and chats
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.
Don’t worry, when you graduate high school you’ll drop the anarchist bit, too.
Because grown ups are capitalists ?
Obviously it varies, but a thing happens where as you’re exposed to the details of how the world works, 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.
Nah, it’s just that eventually you realize there is more to life that questioning your parents and wearing black.
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.
Having children: I was completely against it for most of my adult life, then dated someone who wanted children while I still didn’t and realised what compromise meant. Now I’ve got a kid with another person and the person who changed my mind is almost set against having kids.
Recreational drugs: I thought they were stupid and should be banned harder until my friends started smoking weed, etc. I eventually became a stoner for a while, but have since figured that the issue is more around disordered drug use which is more socially circumstantial than individual.
My opinions on the death penalty would turn liberal philosophers in their graves enough to power a town.
I used to joke about eating two animals for every one a vegetarian didn’t eat. I’ve been vegan for over a decade now, pulled a bit of an uno reverse in my early twenties.
Oh great. Now I gotta eat four animals. I’m never gonna finish lunch.
You can switch to crickets, I think that’s your best murder per Kg ratio.
Yeah we all go through a stage where we haven’t mentally matured yet and have this tween-like rebellion reaction to any idea about changing for the better. Some grow out of it at a younger age, some at a normal age, and some not at all. I remember a bunch of examples I’ve seen happen through the decades;
“You say i shouldn’t eat meat, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna eat twice as much!”
“You say i shouldn’t smoke cigarettes, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna smoke cigars too!”
“You say i shouldn’t be racist, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna be even more outrageously racist!”
It’s just a non-thinking reactionary response to the idea that you aren’t perfect.
I think it’s funny that there have been a bunch of stories about how genZ is smoking again because it’s some kind of nihilist counterculture and I’m just like… Yeah I didn’t quit smoking because the priest gave me a very stern lecture. I quit because I got tired of hacking up half a lung every morning.
Before using AI for the first time: “Holy shit this is gonna be dope!”
Aftwr using AI: “Yo wtf? This is bullshit.”
Shout out for “tech wont save us” podcast. It kinda crystalised my thoughts around this - tech indeed will not save us.
Itd be fine if it was just useless slop that sat there. But then it gets shoved I to every last possible device, burning up water, and taking up valuable land resources to enrich billionaires, oh and outright stealing the works of others while telling us plebs “it’s illegal to do that!” Thats the issues I have. If it was all locally ran, open source, trained in public data only, I’d maybe be OK with it being used for research or data purposes only (nothing to do with art or surveillance) but we will never have that.
