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The worst political opinions I ever really had was around sophomore through junior year of college (2005-2006), when I had recently switched to a finance major and was convinced that more "extreme" liberals just didn't understand the complexities of the economy and business. But even then I never really became libertarian or anything and still considered myself liberal; I just tended to reflexively dismiss anything to the left of the Democratic Party on the basis of having seen some dumb college activists or whatever. Even during high school I was just a very stereotypical liberal and thought that books making fun of conservatives were the best thing ever.
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Jun 3, 2016 01:54
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Yoshifan823 posted:I'm still not entirely sure how I got to be as far left as I am, because my dad is a solid Republican and my mom is one of those people who like to come across as independent (though she's definitely more liberal than conservative these days). On the other side of this coin, part of why I became an "actual leftist" and came to dislike liberals is that my dad is an extreme fervent liberal and I came to notice that his views weren't really any more well thought out that those of conservatives. This isn't to say that the things liberals and conservatives believe are remotely the same (liberal beliefs are obviously still better, mainly because they come from a more moral basis), but I noticed that he (and the liberal blogs and pundits he would read) seemed to care more about owning conservatives than actually evaluating and defining their own beliefs.
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Jun 3, 2016 06:23
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forkboy84 posted:I was never a massively extreme atheist, but I definitely got caught up in the whole Dawkins/Hitchens wave of new atheism, of evangelical atheism, which was probably really boring for other people but I didn't really get into the Islamophobic elements of it, Islam never really seemed any more or less bad that other religions. I'm still an atheist but I'm much less interested in telling other people. I was mostly the same, though I don't remember "new atheism" really being a term back then. I was in my college's "Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers" club (2004-2008), which I ended up somehow becoming President of even after I mostly lost interest in it after the first year or so (because I had stopped caring about being atheist). To be fair, the club was pretty good and all the regular members weren't stereotypical "reddit atheists." We did get these two extremely obnoxious guys who both wore thick-rimmed black glasses and would constantly try and say edgy stuff and move conversations towards controversial topics, and we ended up having to kick them out.
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Jun 3, 2016 18:10
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minimalist posted:Despite having generally great English teachers, I was really bad at reading for deeper meaning throughout my teen years and even through half of college and tended to take a lot of things at face value and believe people I really shouldn't have, leading to some bad opinions I won't go into. Aww come on, you can't just say that and then not elaborate.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:06
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Popular Thug Drink posted:SA is definitely aging, probably the average poster here now is in their thirties I wonder if this also applies to newer posters. I joined back in 2005 when I was in college, so obviously anyone else who joined around or before then will be at least 30 now, but there's still a relatively steady influx of new users. I'm guessing there's some self-selection where the dumber (which probably trend younger to some extent) posters end up getting banned. Speaking of SA, LF actually had a pretty big influence on my political views. It made me feel vicariously embarrassed (through seeing other people's views get torn apart) about some of the more naive liberal (naive in the sense of believing Democratic politicians were great and "free market with some regulations" was obviously The Best political system) views. Before that I was very much your average American democrat/liberal.
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Jun 7, 2016 01:36
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Secular Humanist posted:I used to think criticising Islamic culture or doctrine was racist because a lot of Muslims have brown skin. Yes, I was that patronizing. I thought I had to coddle and infantilize them because I was riddled with white guilt. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was essentially operating as a defacto apologist for bronze age theocracy in the name of "multiculturalism". I think the argument isn't so much "there is nothing wrong with Islam"; it's more that people notice those who spend a bunch of time criticizing Islam almost always do so disproportionately. When people talk (or write) it's not just important whether what they're saying is true or not; it's also important to look at how what they're saying fits into the broader context of the things they choose to talk about. So even though someone may be correct in saying "there are a lot of problems with fundamentalist Islam," the people who say that sort of thing often completely ignore (or only give a token mention to) other issues of equal importance with other cultures. Another point of contention is that people from your perspective usually argue that the problem stems from Islam/Islamic culture, while others believe that the root cause of certain behavior is far more complex and usually stems more from stuff like a country's geopolitical situation(,etc) than the religion itself.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:50
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nopantsjack posted:A friend of mine who never had sex still holds those views, that is my evidence that sex makes you have Good Opinions. I have a friend who may or may not hold terrible views towards women, and it's always been a Pandora's box of sorts that I don't want to open. I would rather live in ignorance of him possibly having terrible sexist opinions. I don't think it's likely exactly, but I would say there's maybe a 30-40% chance it's the case. For some background, this friend's only relationship experience consists of an online relationship with some woman he met on some forums. It was a very uncomfortable situation because I knew from very early on that there was a good reason this woman kept putting off meeting my friend in person, but my friend was in denial. She finally agrees to meet and he flies to where she lives, only to find out that her pictures were from like 10 years ago and she's very obese (my friend is actually a pretty tall completely normal/healthy looking guy). Somehow she convinces my friend to have sex (he was a virgin before), and he breaks up with her immediately after the end of the trip. Anyways, I worry that this situation may have spawned some terrible opinions on women in general. A lack of exposure to women seems to frequently result in some men treating them like a different species.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:09
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Barudak posted:I was pro forced cross racial marriage, i.e. White can't marry white because my parents told me that pure bred dogs were less healthy than mutts. besides my parents did it so it was obviously super easy and good to do so. Did you ever think about how that would work given that there are many large geographical areas with like 90% white people, so you'd end up with the majority of people being unable to marry and have children? I'm curious about the logistics of this idea. Are people in majority white areas forcibly relocated to areas with more minorities?
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Aug 5, 2016 22:30
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i used to think everyone should forcibly be on birth control and that you'd have to take and pass a parenting examination before you gained a license to have children and your birth control removed I know otherwise intelligent biology professors/postdocs in their 30s who have said similar things to this, basically saying that dumb (read: poor) people should be sterilized and what have you. Basically people in general do not have much empathy for others.
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Aug 5, 2016 22:57
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i dont even think people should be sterilized, just some magical nonexistent quasipermanent birth control that can only be removed at a licensed fertility clinic. not even a eugenics thing for me like "dumb people shouldn't breed" because in my view intelligence is only loosely correlated at best with parenting skill I think the problem is that, in practice, approval for becoming a parent would become strongly linked with factors like race and income (due to the fact that people, with all their biases, would be the ones running such a system).
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Aug 5, 2016 23:04
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Octatonic posted:So, if you can still access that part of your brain, out of curiosity, what just made sense about it? What makes Mr. Limbaugh persuasive? Eh, I can understand why someone might believe it. I mean, it *is* true that (some) money you give to the rich trickles down to the non-rich; it's just that it's dumb as hell to do that when you can just give the money directly to the non-rich. There's also the idea that giving business owners money will cause them to hire more people, which sounds sorta intuitive if you don't think too hard about it (and realize that hiring is primarily driven by demand). So I can understand why someone might agree with supply-side economics if they were young and had just never been introduced to the better alternative of "give stimulus to the non-rich instead."
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Aug 12, 2016 06:47
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doverhog posted:Not really. The rich already have tons of money they don't use for anything. Giving them more has absolutely no positive impact. This is doubly true when the giving is done by taking the money out of things that are already doing something useful, I.E. cutting taxes. I think you missed the "(some)" in my post. It is, in fact, true that a non-zero amount of money you give to the rich ends up "trickling down" to the non-rich; it's just extremely inefficient.
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Aug 12, 2016 07:55
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