Religion being completely stupid and harmful. 2005-2016 me was 100% certain nothing good ever came out of religion, it was only useful for making corrupt shitheads powerful and keeping easily amazed idiots in line.

Took me a while to realize how religion can help integrate the community with its local/historical culture, something that's easier to notice with minority religions. It is, after all, an instrument of power. Like any such instrument, it attracts people who should never have any sort of power, but that's a wholly different discussion.

For a long time I thought the whole pronoun /name /being outta the closet thing didn't personally matter to me to make the effort to attempt to change it.

Yeah I figured out I was trans at age 21 in the quite distant past but like my partner had sex characteristic preferences that meant that as long as I prioritized him in my long term goals I wasn't physically changing. I figured you know boo hoo I was ugly and people didn't really get me most of the time but you know... Big deal? I was stable enough. I wasn't under particular hardship because aside from some vague presentation pressure from time to time everyone just basically accepted I was quirky and liked me enough without putting much emphasis on my gender anyway... I ended up trying gender neutral pronouns basically as a lark, a way of proving to myself that I was fine.

Turns out I was not fine.

I didn't realize how shit I felt on a regular basis nor how much less energy all my social connections would need once I made the changeover. I really didn't realize that such a tiny thing was subtly poisoning every single interaction I had with people. I stopped experiencing stress heartburn and headaches after time spent with friends. I was usually pretty quiet and withdrawn but I actually started being generally more gregarious and active. I stopped feeling invisible and lonely. I went from low key disliking people to actually liking them. It was like someone suddenly replaced my batteries. I never expected something so small to make so big a difference.

In a long run, from childhood to adulthood, I switched to communism hater to being communist myself. When I was a kid, I thought that Communism was a ideology for lazy and totalitarian people, I didn't even knew what it was about.

I also was the kind of person who laughed with edgy/uncensored comedy, now my eyes roll everytime I hear or read any joke that targets socially oppressed groups.

I was a cat person, always had a cat or two but never a dog. Dogs were too much trouble, barky needy creatures. My ex wanted a dog, we got a dog. Who got the dog when we spilt? Yep.

I still tend to think I am a cat person with a dog, but since then have always had a dog, Dogs are awesome, I was wrong.

I'm another Libertarian to Socialist convert. Also ultra-conservative religious to nonreligious.

I started reading up on the origins of beliefs I held. I learned that Hayek (author of The Road to Serfdom, a father of Austrian economics) thought that his ideal laissez faire economics could only be sustained with universal social safety nets like UBI and healthcare for all. Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations, father of American capitalism) basically replaced royal bloodlines with wealth birthright, using class separation of ownership (and heavy emphasis on slavery) instead of historic feudalism. His system was basically the same, just replacing the tiny ruling class. And I discovered Marx wasn't some evil terrorist trying to destroy the world.

For religion, it was all the internal inconsistencies. The problem with fundamentalism is that it's self-destructive. Everyone fights over smaller and smaller interpretation differences, searching for The Truth, ignoring that you can literally back up any conclusion by justifying it backwards with the text. And everybody in a conservative religion has a lot of immovable conclusions they will defend to the exclusion of all evidence or all people.

Weapons as a human right.

I was on the fence about it before. But then I was homeless, got attacked by a stranger and beaten pretty badly, was saved by some other strangers because the guy showed no signs of stopping.

After that I went to buy some pepper spray to carry with me, and was notified it required a license. Being a homeless man I couldn’t get licenses for things.

I realized that it’s a problem if weapons are treated like something you need to earn privilege to own, because the underprivileged then won’t have them.

That’s why I realized it’s important we treat weapons as a human right, not as a privilege to be earned if you’re nice.

I used to be a nationalist (not a nazi though), then an ancap. Now I am a socialist and have been so for about ten years now.

"cooking with love/ heart" means watching that damn pot get hot and when it says constantly stir, you damn well constantly stir.

half-assing steps doesn't quite make it in terms of taste and texture.

in my kiddie head, it used to mean singing Disney princess song to the pot while randomly yeeting ingredients in.

mad respect to cooks and chefs now.

Democracy and collaboration in general. I love the idea of working together with people for the greater good and the idea that if we just all have a say in things, that will make things better over time, but it feels like the last few decades have shot down both these notions. We've got our own democratic system here in the US that's getting attacked by foreign actors who are jamming up the system with misinformation, noise, and propaganda. We've got Congress members who appear to be on the take from foreign governments and don't seem to have any sort of agenda apart from gumming up the works and bringing government to a halt. I don't think a dictatorship or fascism is the solution, but holy crap do we need to sweep away the people who are obviously working in bad faith to undermine our democracy. Even just relying on people to vote in their own best interests or the best interests of the country in general is really not a reliable way to get rid of bad actors in the system.

With regards to collaboration (in business or personal settings), I've rarely seen anything come from it. In school, "collaboration" meant working on group projects where 99% of the group did nothing and 1 or 2 people drove the project forward. Much the same happens in business work groups. Trying to get friends or random strangers on the internet to collaborate on writing or gaming projects has just been an exercise in futility for years, as it usually ends up being 1 or 2 people driving things forward, and no real commitment or output from anybody else (people flake out regularly). I just stopped trying to work with other people on anything unless somebody else pulls me into something and shows some amount of progress on their end, otherwise I just feel frustrated when it seems like I'm the only one even trying to do anything. Any of my "biggest achievements" in life have been things I worked on on my own or was the primary driver behind it.

Anarchism and Satanism; when I was a kid, it was just something edgy weirdos would talk about for attention, but as a grownup I am seeing the validity of the thinking behind these ideologies - without identifying as one - but I now see them in a more open and accepting light.

I used to think conservatives just had a different view than my own and weren't evil just because we disagreed.

Yes. They. Are.

The more I saw what was seething under the surface, the less I believed that the modern right was worth a damn. And eventually Trump made all that evil that was hiding feel comfortable coming out into the open. The racism, stupidity and utter disdain for rules, common decency and human life in the modern right is sickening. I refuse to acknowledge an ideology that supports the ghoulish things the modern right does as being valid and deserving of a place at the debate table.

Disagreeing on zoning regulations in cities is valid. Locking brown kids in cages, separating them from their parents and shrugging whenever another dozen school kids get filled with so many bullet holes that we can only identify them through DNA tests while threatening their parents with being deported by ICE is evil.

And the conservative mentality that people "dont want to work anymore" is hilariously divorced from reality. There's a chemical company in my area that hasn't bothered to update their wanted ad on job sites for years. The starting wage theyre advertising at the low end of the pay scale is a dollar and a half below minimum wage. They require a BS in chemistry. They cant figure out why no one wants to work for them. That sort of stupidity is EVERYWHERE but its those damned greedy workers that are the problem apparently. You cant fucking survive on what companies are willing to pay and the degree of laziness in management is astounding.

And theres this pervasive mentality on the right where people would love nothing more than to cut wages of people that work in jobs that they dont respect like food service to supposedly lower prices rather than advocate for their own wages to be increased. Thats evil too. Theres a lot of evil shit going on on the right even if you ignore what happened with roe v wade being overturned (yeah theyre attacking women that had miscarriages now) As if there werent enough reasons for me to despise the modern right as it was.

THINK. I used to think "if something is true, then it's ok to say it." Turns out, there are more filters you should apply before you choose to say something. There are TONS of things that are true, and you could say, but they are still terrible things to say.

Also, following THINK will save you from saying some things that you think are true at the time but are actually false.