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I was a smug South Park "Maybe both sides are wrong" contrarian for a lot my early years. It's took me a while to realize that refusing to take a position is not only a position, but it's a loving lazy one that's usually in favour of a terrible status quo.
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Jun 9, 2016 09:55
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I used to think that South Park was actually educational and qualified as "smart" TV.
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Jun 9, 2016 14:48
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I never had bad political opinions, OP.
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Jun 9, 2016 16:38
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Popular Thug Drink posted:this thread is for past bad opinions not current bad opinions. please keep your racist trash opinions out of this thread thanks Islam isn't a race  JVNO posted:
Then how do middle class British Muslims ever become radicalized? I thought the old liberal shibboleth of "it's poverty/lack of education/desperation, not religion!" had been sufficiently dispensed with but it appears otherwise. Look, I understand probating someone for being off topic, but this clearly isn't what this is about. If someone had come in and said, "my bad opinion was when I used to think women deserved the vote" and someone else had responded, "actually women do deserve the vote and it's horrifying that you think otherwise", the former would have been probated rather than the latter and we all know it. Yes, the discussion of what exactly are all the relevant factors in modern Islamic terrorism are and how big of a role the specific religion plays should be had elsewhere, but we can't just reflexively probate people who criticize Islam while yelling "racist!", that's going to do nothing to help the issue, in this thread or elsewhere. FOR CONTENT: I distinctly remember as a youngster spouting the line, "Gay people don't need to get married, they have civil unions and that's just as good!" I clearly had never been instructed on the faulty logic of "separate but equal".
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Jun 9, 2016 17:05
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Balbir Singh Sodhi's ghost would like a word with you buddy So would the ghosts of a lot of Arab Christians who got murdered by rednecks in retaliation for 9/11
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Jun 9, 2016 17:26
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:
I used to believe all marriage should be replaced with civil unions, thus fixing the "problem". Since then have grown magnanimous; whatever god worshipers, keep your dumb weddings. 
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Jun 9, 2016 17:34
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Islam isn't a race i'd like for you to go around and educate the millions of americans who confuse sikhs for arabs just because you know islam isn't a race, and i know islam isn't a race, doesn't mean that there isn't tons of racist behavior exhibited towards people who 'look like' muslims GAINING WEIGHT... posted:we can't just reflexively probate people who criticize Islam while yelling "racist!", that's going to do nothing to help the issue, in this thread or elsewhere. yes we can, it helps the issue of people posting racist trash in threads
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Jun 9, 2016 17:36
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I was a Libertarian leaning opinions editor of our high school newspaper
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Jun 9, 2016 18:49
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i'd like for you to go around and educate the millions of americans who confuse sikhs for arabs Please don't disingenuously shift the target of your comments to justify them. You weren't responding to moron right-wingers shouting "Go back ta where ya came from, MUSLIM" at an Indian man, you were responding to someone who made some cogent and rational critiques of the religion. Another poster responded to this with a different explanation for why things are the way they are in the Muslim world; while I disagree with the poster, at least they were making an honest attempt at rebuttal. Caterwauling "racism!!!!!!!" will only impede progress on this very real issue. Nothing in this conversation was about race until you brought it up. It is possible to respond to other people's viewpoints and remain intellectually honest at the same time.
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Jun 9, 2016 19:39
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Please don't disingenuously shift the target of your comments to justify them. You weren't responding to moron right-wingers shouting "Go back ta where ya came from, MUSLIM" at an Indian man, you were responding to someone who made some cogent and rational critiques of the religion. Another poster responded to this with a different explanation for why things are the way they are in the Muslim world; while I disagree with the poster, at least they were making an honest attempt at rebuttal. Caterwauling "racism!!!!!!!" will only impede progress on this very real issue. Nothing in this conversation was about race until you brought it up. the issue is people posting racist crap on a forum. pointing out that the post is racist is an acceptable response to the problem of "are people posting racist crap in a forum that does not generally permit racist crap" the poster in question specifically said that leftists do not want to question brown people. if you want to continue to claim that argument has nothing to do with race then go ahead and i probably wont read that post
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Jun 9, 2016 20:03
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Flowers For Algeria posted:The fact that I was an idiot, who wouldn't vote for Ségolène Royal because lolol she's a shrill airhead. So I thought I was a grownup doing the sensible, adult choice. :slaps: I couldn't vote in 2007 but I would have voted for Besancenot  the postman always trots twice
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Jun 9, 2016 20:07
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Back in early highscool, in the early 2000s, I came across some MRA polemics. It didn't take much for me to buy into a lot of it, since I already hated being male and had so much bottled up resentment about it. While I never really advocated for anything, I believed a lot of MRA talking points and would bring them up at times, because "gently caress you." Took me until my first year of college to realize that it was a bunch of nonsense, and only slightly longer to really admit to myself that I was transgender. In highschool I also went through a period of Islamophobia. Basically I'd heard all about how Christians in the Middle East were oppressed by the Muslims. I did a presentation on it in my English class, which led me a bit further down the rabbit hole since while I did the research I was exposed to a lot more. Became my pet issue for a few years, and at one point I took a pen and wrote all sorts of anti-Islam stuff in the school bathrooms on the stall doors. In retrospect, that was idiotic. My Islamophobia continued well into College, since I had a professor that really preached it. I started to learn a bit more about Islam though and realized a lot of what I'd heard was nonsense, much of the rest is hardly unique to Islam. It took some time before it petered out, until eventually my thoughts on Islam became "meh".
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Jun 10, 2016 07:13
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Political violence coming from Islam post-2000 is actually pretty similar to political violence from the far left 1960s-80s. hell you even have the analogue between isis and cambodia/dprk/cultural revolution/whatever weirdass poo poo crazies are running in the third world
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Jun 10, 2016 07:52
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Popular Thug Drink posted:the poster in question specifically said that leftists do not want to question brown people. if you want to continue to claim that argument has nothing to do with race then go ahead and i probably wont read that post Right, that's a critique of leftists/liberals mistakenly equating "Muslims" with "brown people" and then being afraid of saying anything negative about them, not the poster him or herself doing so. This really is a conversation for another thread at this point so reply to this there and link it if you want to keep talking, but it seems clear you're not interested in discussion so much as thinking you're right.
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Jun 10, 2016 16:50
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Vulpes Vvardenfell posted:Back in early highscool, in the early 2000s, I came across some MRA polemics. It didn't take much for me to buy into a lot of it, since I already hated being male and had so much bottled up resentment about it. While I never really advocated for anything, I believed a lot of MRA talking points and would bring them up at times, because "gently caress you." Tell us more about your high school opinions, also why you hated being male?
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Jun 10, 2016 17:21
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Lichy posted:Tell us more about your high school opinions, also why you hated being male? I apologize, but I can't really tell if this sarcastic or not. Not sure what to elaborate on specifically, but if you are legitimately interested in hearing it I could say more. As far the latter question, that's really a bit too complicated an issue to delve into. I'm not that sure the specific details of it are all that relevant to the thread either, only that I had a lot of bottled up resentment over being male, was deeply troubled by it, and that made me bitter and helped lead me into some really dumb beliefs.
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Jun 10, 2016 17:49
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Vulpes Vvardenfell posted:I apologize, but I can't really tell if this sarcastic or not. Not sure what to elaborate on specifically, but if you are legitimately interested in hearing it I could say more. He's not being sincere.
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Jun 10, 2016 17:57
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OwlFancier posted:He's not being sincere. I on the other hand am. I'd be interested to hear his story.
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Jun 10, 2016 18:02
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I'm also interested in hearing more about Vulpes' highschool opinions.
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Jun 10, 2016 18:46
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Vulpes Vvardenfell posted:I apologize, but I can't really tell if this sarcastic or not. Not sure what to elaborate on specifically, but if you are legitimately interested in hearing it I could say more. It's cool I'm genuinely interested how one goes seemingly from one extreme to another like that and what the thinking/emotional process behind that was. Also MRA stuff is funny.
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Jun 10, 2016 19:26
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Lichy posted:It's cool I'm genuinely interested how one goes seemingly from one extreme to another like that and what the thinking/emotional process behind that was. Also MRA stuff is funny. Well, early in highschool I used to call myself a "Skeptic" and used to read CSICOP's website and similar things. One day I was bouncing between links to related sites, when I came across a page which was filled with articles debunking various kinds of "woo". One of the articles was on the subject of "Women's Isses" or Feminism or something similar. I don't remember the exact wording. From what I remember, the article argued some of the usual things like that the pay gap doesn't really exist because women work less dangerous jobs. From there it started to talk about how society considers men to be expendable - partly explained by the fact that men can't give birth to children - and that is why men are encouraged to work high risk jobs, and why they're sent off to die in wars. What I do remember very clearly was the statement, "White women in Western culture are the most privileged group in the world." It wasn't hard for me to buy into that, since being male seemed pretty miserable to me. And it was a somewhere to point blame. From my point of view, not only was I unlucky enough to be biologically male of course, but ontop of that, culture expected me to behave in a masculine way, etc, and it was it was because I was being oppressed by our "female-centric" society. For some reason I assumed that everyone must feel the same way about masculinity, that it was it was largely something unpleasant forced on you because you were born male. I read more of that kind of stuff, and for some years afterwards, whenever someone mentioned something like the pay gap, I had to point out to them that it was wrong and we should be paying more attention to men. Similarly whenever domestic violence came up, I'd tell them that men are more often beaten by wives and girlfriends than the opposite, and I'd tell them about how my uncle was beaten by his ex-wife. I was against the idea of chivalry, because I saw it as almost like an insult by society. You're expected to personally defer to women and give them special treatment, as if to say that they're better than you, as if it point at how lucky they were to be born female and essentially rubbing your nose in it. Eventually though I started to realize that a lot of that stuff was untrue or just wrongheaded. What really brought me out of that line of thinking entirely was once I came to realize that a lot of feminists are against a lot of the cultural things that are harmful to men. Nowadays I'm really kind of ashamed of myself for being such an idiot before, but mostly I'm just glad to be past it. Also, I'm no longer miserable now. I was finally able to start dealing with my gender issues once I finally understood that I was in fact transgender, and beginning to transition has made a world of difference for me.
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Jun 11, 2016 00:23
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I went, in the space of three years, from a teenage Christian into an annoying atheist. A bit of background: Finland isn't the most religious country. Most people are Christian on paper and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is the single largest congregation, but most people only ever visit church maybe once a year for Christmas and maybe when there's a christening, wedding or funeral in their immediate family, and most people don't really even identify as Christians in spite of being members of the church. Anyway, aside for religion classes in school there's one time when almost all Finns who are members of the church will receive some religious education: confirmation camp. It's basically a week-long Summer camp during which 15-year-olds are taught the basics of the Lutheran faith, all in preparation for their confirmation (which is basically a public profession of faith that makes you a for-reals member of the faith) which is followed by their first eucharist. For most kids it's just a week-long camp that they have to go to in order to be showered with gifts by their family members. I, on the other hand, took it completely to heart. It was probably because I'd been bullied as a kid and had always been a bit ostracized socially, so I was vulnerable to any kind of message that involved a kind and loving God who would love me unconditionally as well as a community that would accept me into it simply on the basis of my faith. So, the next three years after confirmation I would spend multiple days of the week at church hanging out with my friends and felt really accepted for the first time in my life. Of course, by the time I turned eighteen I'd already started struggling with my faith, partly because my then teacher of religious studies and philosophy was a really knowledgeable guy. I don't think it was his intention to make me question my faith (he is a Christian, albeit a very liberal one) but since he taught us a class which covered most of the world religions as well as some ideas on inter-religious dialogue (one of the sources he referred to us was a website called religioustolerance.org I think?) upon actually looking at other faiths alongside my own with a critical eye I started really questioning my own faith. Like, what evidence did I have that my faith was the one of all the entirely unprovable religions that was true? I could've taken it sensibly, still identifying as Christian but simply taken an agnostic stance ("I think Christianity is pretty cool, but so is your religion, and we just don't know, you know?"), but instead I went for 100% atheism, and drat if I wasn't the most annoying one. I made it a point to bring up the fact that I was an atheist any chance I could just to provoke arguments with my religious friends, and I even hung out in online atheist communities for a year or two. Oddly enough, while a lot of people here have associated their teenage atheism phase with a dose of Islamophobia, I don't think my own brand of militant teenage atheism was particularly Islamophobic. It may have been in the subtle "All the religions are actually bad" kind of way, but as an atheist I was extremely down on the war in Iraq because I viewed it through the lens of religious conflict (which was, of course, very naive). I'm still an atheist, but I've mellowed out considerably in the past twelve years. Part of the reason for me chilling out on the subject has to do with the fact that I discovered goth music and engaging in online goth communities took most of my computer-time so I didn't have time to actively check the various atheist communities I was once part of. Good thing too: even though my time at those atheist communities was limited I recall it was pretty much a mixture of milquetoast American liberalism accompanied by some edgier-than-thou Libertarianism (A lot of subtle "I don't see race or race-related problems because I'm so enlightened" racism, with similar attitudes towards women's issues). Based on what I've heard about atheists still active in online communities these days, it's pretty much more of the same but somehow worse. Also, mellowing out on my stance has also opened up new avenues for me: now that I can look at religions critically without fear of it shaking my faith, I've actually discovered that religions are filled with awesome stories and myths which are pretty cool simply for the sake of reading but also for understanding where people of various religions are coming from in terms of their faith. One thing I have kept from my days as a teenage Christian: a strong understanding of scripture as well as the basics of Christian theology (again, thanks to that really cool religion teacher of mine), and an extremely low opinion of people who claim to be Christian but who don't live according to the actual teachings of Jesus (not a huge fan of the types of Bible-belt Republicans you occasionally see on the news, and strangely enough their brand of crazy Christianity is infecting some folks here in Finland too).
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Jun 12, 2016 07:46
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doverhog posted:I used to believe all marriage should be replaced with civil unions, thus fixing the "problem". Since then have grown magnanimous; whatever god worshipers, keep your dumb weddings. I still believe this and am incredibly salty that I can't get a civil partnership. IIRC around the gay marriage debate time in the UK it was proposed to extend marriage and partnership to everyone but they loving back-pedalled on it and are now considering removing civil partnerships altogether. I would absolutely hate to and will never be someone's 'wife' but I wouldn't mind being their partner. Bad opinions: used to think Dawkins was cool and once did an unironic school presention advocating for the voluntary human extinction movement e: in general I don't think I ever had massively bad opinions but I guess they used to be stronger/more one-sided, like now I feel pretty disillusioned with feminism even though I would still call myself one, whereas even just five years back I had no doubts at all Prism Mirror Lens fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Jun 12, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 13:59
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I was a socialist until about age 20.
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Jun 12, 2016 20:37
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TheImmigrant posted:I was a socialist until about age 20. Which type? Vulpes Vvardenfell posted:Well, early in highschool I used to call myself a "Skeptic" and used to read CSICOP's website and similar things. One day I was bouncing between links to related sites, when I came across a page which was filled with articles debunking various kinds of "woo". One of the articles was on the subject of "Women's Isses" or Feminism or something similar. I don't remember the exact wording. Thanks for this, interesting read. I'm glad you managed alright! Bulgogi Hoagie fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jun 12, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 20:39
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i was a tfr poster
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Jun 12, 2016 22:32
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Popular Thug Drink posted:this thread is for past bad opinions not current bad opinions. please keep your racist trash opinions out of this thread thanks I used to think and say poo poo like this, so glad I grew out of it.
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Jun 13, 2016 09:18
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I believed voting works
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Jun 13, 2016 14:21
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Yeah I guess I bought into liberal democracy, too. I don't know that I've ever had bad opinions, but from the way people here on SA used to treat left socialists, you almost had me convinced a time or two 
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Jun 13, 2016 18:06
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I used to be a dumbass but now I graduated to being a down right dipshit
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Jun 14, 2016 19:21
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I was a technocrat in high school, totally convinced that if we just put technical and scientific experts in charge then all of society could be organized and operated perfectly rationally and scientifically.
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Jun 15, 2016 06:09
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Vulpes Vvardenfell posted:Also, I'm no longer miserable now. I was finally able to start dealing with my gender issues once I finally understood that I was in fact transgender, and beginning to transition has made a world of difference for me. You and me both... I found it gives you a real perspective on just how real male privilege is and how invisible it is when you possess it too.
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Jun 15, 2016 07:24
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Jagchosis posted:i thought south park was funny also internalized the gently caress out of its politics when i was 17 the south park thread on tv iv is a microcosm of every pedantic white nerd i encountered in early 2000's internet 
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Jun 15, 2016 21:34
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South Park has pretty much become self-parody with their newer episodes. We get it, you don't like "PC Police". You don't have to have an entire season built around the exact same joke.
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Jun 15, 2016 22:08
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I was hardcore neconservative from about early 2000 up until early 2004, complete with stances that make Trump look downright kind to immigrants for the first part. Doing some work in tobacco fields for summer money cured me of the xenophobia masked as economics, fast. The glass parking lot talk, "what's good for corporations is good for the rest of us," and Patriot Act support died as soon as a friend sat with me and essentially yelled a lot of points I couldn't refute. I stormed off, but after a couple of hours of fuming it all through my head, I had to admit I had nothing in response that I honestly believed to refute him. Said friend now teaches high school history classes, so that's a good thing.  Glad as hell I didn't stumble upon Ayn Rand in high school, because I'd have eat that poo poo up at the time.
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Jun 16, 2016 04:17
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Vulpes Vvardenfell posted:Well, early in highschool I used to call myself a "Skeptic" and used to read CSICOP's website and similar things. One day I was bouncing between links to related sites, when I came across a page which was filled with articles debunking various kinds of "woo". One of the articles was on the subject of "Women's Isses" or Feminism or something similar. I don't remember the exact wording. I can recognize a lot of your experiences, barring the transgender parts. The general insecurity of being a young teenager, performing bad in PE class when I would've had good scores if I were held to the same standards as girls, buying into the "good guys finish last" mentality. I thought and wrote some stupid poo poo about women and minorities. At this stage I was dipping toes into MRA and PUA sites and ueergh. The fact that teenagers in general are stupid doesn't help. It can be easy to believe all this stupid stuff about women when everyone in your class, girls included, has dumb ideas about the world and other people's place in it. Hearing girls excitedly whisper about how black men are better in bed, or seeing this or that 15 year-old in my class dating a 19 year-old college dropout because he's "cool" (aka he's a loving tool and teenagers think that age = wisdom) made me feel disposable or unwanted. Looking back, it was really a lot of really minor and petty stuff and I attached too much importance to it all. I'm just glad I grew out of it.
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Jun 16, 2016 10:57
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Deltasquid posted:... buying into the "good guys finish last" mentality.... made me feel disposable or unwanted. THIS This right here is the source of ALOT of certain Nerd online movements that shall not be mentioned When you're an unhealthy unattractive single (read: lonely) male virgin nerd with absolutely ZERO life experiences, hearing about the pressures women go through to achieve some warped perception of beauty society put upon them, or really any sort of disadvantage, sends you into a frothing rage quote:how are YOU having dating problems?! you have VAGINA BONES!!! BornAPoorBlkChild fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jun 16, 2016 |
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Jun 16, 2016 16:59
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Race Realists posted:THIS This assumes that these nerds are "good guys" to begin with.
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Jun 16, 2016 17:30
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punk rebel ecks posted:This assumes that these nerds are "good guys" to begin with. A lot of them are. (Or rather, aren't a lot worse than the other self-centered pricks that populate the misanthropic thunderdome that's called high school.) It's just that some never grow out of their high school mentality. Some of those become FYGM types who never got over their entitlement complex, others write blogs about negging and men's rights.
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Jun 16, 2016 17:51
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Race Realists posted:THIS so could someone tell who started this really dumb vagina bones meme? cuz its loving hilarious
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Jun 16, 2016 19:14
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