Ask Lemmy

The American dream.

Born in a south American country, I've grown bombarded by USA propaganda. Later on, by studying word history through different points of view, I've realized the evil USA imperialist practices are and the damage it has imposed to all the "underdeveloped" countries. "Not all USA is bad, but it's always USA doing bad things".

When I was a freshman in college I thought "Surely nobody would want to inherit genetic diseases, and why wouldn't we want to to try and make people just naturally live longer, healthier lives?" but then I did even the tiniest bit of research on how eugenics actually worked and I completely abandoned that line of thinking.

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.

That a dictatorship led by a "good, strong leader" would be enough to fix any country. Held that belief from ages 16-22. With time, I understood that it would devolve into a bad strong leader anyway, especially because any one single person cannot realistically do everything at such a large scale, nor can they ensure that everyone down the chain of command is "good". Paranoia would seep in, more and more resources would be spent hunting "the bad ones", innocents would be wrongfully accused either by honest mistake or by malicious enemies.

Nowadays, I really enjoy the idea of "Do not take for yourself any power that you would loathe your worst enemy to have" and I wish it could be applied to all levels of politics.

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

AI. Back in the olden days when I first played The Talos Principle, I was convinved that AI would be cool and offer us fascinating insights into the mysteries of consciousness. I never expected... this

The US

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.

That Dems were a leftist party and cared about helping people.

Then I finished high school and started actually paying attention.

The biggest ones were I was religious and became atheist, was vegetarian and now eat meat sometimes, and I was a nominalist and am a platonist

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.