In my experience, people don’t like to be on the wrong side of an issue. When confronted with evidence, people with reactionary ideas tend to get very angry and go bad faith. I guess that would be the cognitive dissonance playing out. I think we’ve all seen many a lib get ultra shitty when clear facts are ruining their ideology.
So here’s my history:
Around 2020ish and the protests after the George Floyd murder, many BIPOC activists were calling out the bullshit of white and/or men amongst the liberal and left crowds. For a small amount of time, maybe two months, I played around with the ideas of stupidpol and class determinism. I was probably butthurt for being silenced, which doesn’t actually really happen anyways. The funny thing was that as COVID went on, it was a masterclass in how terrible white/male progressives are. Also Hexbear became big as lockdowns happened, and my thinking has changed to “white guys fucking suck, and if a marginalised person argues with you, you’re better off just shutting the fuck up”.
I gotta go way back in time to find the previous instance. When I was maybe 13, before the internet was a thing, I just to get really damn upset at my older sister calling out her brothers’ sexism. It was a long ass time ago, but I remember feeling red hot angry at feminists. If 4chan or TikTok existed, it would probably channel me into shitty manoshpere ideals. Thankfully I was mostly occupied with WarCraft2 missions and Sim City. It’s far too long ago to remember who was right.
Unrelated to what happened in my teen years, but I’m sad to report that my sister is now an insufferable lib.
Damn some of you guys really fucking sucked
Lots of bad ideas over the years (I’m nearing 50 years old). I was never really outspoken about the cringiest shit, but I was really homophobic in high school. It really came out of a painful insecurity about my own sexuality, and the cultural setting didn’t help either. Ultimately, someone I respected let me know my opinion was garbage and that I should do better. I also got laid and developed some self confidence.
It took me a very long time to unlearn the notion that “proper English” is a sign of intelligence rather than class privilege.
Yes I used to have deeply internalized transphobia, which is funny for an obvious reason.
Basically I went from feminists are cringe, to feminists are cool and actually fighting for us men to, to oh shit I never was a man.
Comrade, my past transphobia was so terrible, that if a person murdered me for the shit I posted in 2009, they would be justified.
internalized transphobia
Oh at least you had an excuse.
All of them at some point or another not rabidly racist or chuddy just a dumbass tepid uninformed liberal parasite paroting state talking points
I cringe remembering how i debated someone about transgenderism being a mental illness
Same
My personal journey went as follows:
- “Yes, it’s a mental illness, but people with mental illnesses deserve effective, compassionate care”
- “Oh, it turns out that research consistently shows that the only effective treatment is validation of their professed gender identity”
- “Also it turns out dysphoria can get really, really bad”
- “State-funded SRS for anyone who wants it”
“Oh, it turns out that research consistently shows that the only effective treatment is validation of their professed gender identity”
I’m constantly frustrated how tens of millions of people can have opinions that can be changed with a minute of Googling.
The essay False Witnesses does a great job of breaking down why this happens.
During Occupy Wall Street, I became a libertarian and though Ron Paul was going to save our country.
😂
Yes I used to be extremely unempathetic to social or economic causes and buy into society’s judgment of those it considers lesser. My family is all huge chuds and it took me many years to deprogram their hatred and vitriol.
CW alcohol abuse
I also was profoundly depressed and drinking heavily for much of my youth, which stunted my connection with others. I’m doing better now.
Empathy can be really hard. One needs to spend a fair amount of energy just feeling what the other person is going through, and the mutual aid part can take even more. To go and question the reason for one’s material comfort is more than most people are willing to do.
Congrats on finding your way out of it. I do have this belief that most white Westoids are absolute sociopaths who have learned away their ability to feel normal empathy.
Oh, more times than I’d necessarily care to admit, and I’m sure I still have some brainworms today. There were a lot of the typical ones when I was a kid, but the “funniest” one in hindsight, if it counts, is that I was an anti-brony for a few years as a kid — but then, somehow, within a few years of declaring the fans of a cartoon show about colorful horses as my archenemies, I ended up like, “Dammit, I’m supposed to hate these people, not spend time with them! Not like them! Not… become one of them!!!” — and now, within a decade of that, I now find myself organizing weekly watch parties for a show that I used to see as the harbinger of the downfall of civilization.
Maybe my anti-brony phase was me making my suppression of my own gendy feelies into other people’s problem, before realizing that I could myself use bronydom as a space to vent those gendy feelies in a manner more “sustainable” than wholesale suppression. Or maybe my anti-bronydom was a reaction to some genuinely unsavory MLP fan content my friends had shown me, before I’d developed the awareness and knowledge to make sense of why people would make and enjoy things like pony.mov. Or maybe both. Or maybe I was just a weird kid with some reactionary brainworms.
TBH I used to quietly hate ppl who did Magic or LARP back in the day, which feels silly now as they were hurting no one, and in the 90s they were more progressive than normies.
Ironically, I’m pretty sure pony.mov was actually anti-brony content.
What makes you say that?
Creator is a chuddy nihilist and I remember the general community reaction at the time being mostly
In 2016 I, a non-American, was angrily arguing online with leftists and telling them they should have gotten with the programme and voted for Hilary.
Non-American’s giving shit to Americans is a public service, regardless of what happened.
deleted by creator
were either lying or exaggerating
I’ve quietly felt this in my teen years
I grew up in a very conservative community, but was like 5 when Iraq happened. I had an Iraqi neighbor and they’re daughter was in my kindergarten and constantly bullied for being Iraqi. I didn’t get it, she was nice. Then I just kept pushing back against everyone I knew as I started learning more and became a “humanist atheist” in middle school which really endeared me to the Christian school I went to.
Just kinda floated around libertarianism for a while because I didn’t know any better and had no one to teach me.
After I dropped out of college and got a job I tried to understand politics more by reading news and became a bit of a lib, though I still disagreed with them on a lot of things. Then I got a job delivering pizzas with a bunch of communists and finally got exposed to Marx and Lenin and Parenti. Turns out I was a communist all along and just didn’t know lol.
I’m sure I’ve got many bad ones, but a couple that come to mind—arguing to my parents while in college that drones were a good thing because they resulted in less casualties.
Also in college, mostly because I was surrounded by neocons-in-training, I occasionally flirted with the idea that the Israel/palestine conflict was a both-sides mess, and that Israel was our important democratic ally on the Middle East. But even then something always subconsciously rubbed, and pretty quick after leaving that world (as the neocons quirky liberal hawk friend) it became logically impossible to square that stuff anymore.
Or maybe the bigger picture was just that I still bought the idea that the US were the good guys and that we were stabilizing the world and spreading democracy… woooof.
I tend to be forgiving to myself on these because I was basically a young idiot, and that’s how it goes. I also feel that all of these stories people are sharing are exactly the point—we learn from our past mistakes and slowly improve our sense of the world, etc. it’s problematic if you aren’t aware of it, or cannot acknowledge it and adjust your thinking, but most growth doesn’t happen perfectly or cleanly, and being kind to yourself, and open to changing your mind are important qualities.
I enjoy the post OP, and also the other commenters’ stories.
Or maybe the bigger picture was just that I still bought the idea that the US were the good guys and that we were stabilizing the world and spreading democracy
I can’t stress enough that this and the other things you said were constantly fed to you from birth. It’s amazing that people do find their way out of Western chauvinism.
For real. I look back on that and think like, how is it possible, but when you’re young, everything you see and hear mostly supports this basic premise. You have to be out in the world a while before your own observations and interactions start to lead to questions about received info.
I thought of another one: about a decade back I would describe my general opinion about China was pretty bog-standard media take of the time: sorta backwards country with “human rights abuses,” poor and authoritarian, but good manufacturing and food. Chinese “people” didn’t really factor as a thing in my mind, just kind of a mass of indistinct humanity. Mostly I just didn’t directly think about it much.
I got the opportunity to go to Beijing and environs for about two weeks, and, of course, I discover the depth of western propaganda messaging that I had been slurping up. It felt like going to the future. Not all of it was my specific cup of tea, but it was not poor, it was far higher tech than the US, and you could just tell that there was a more community than individual culture. Mass transit was fantastic, brand new high speed rail that made a formerly 14-hr trip to xian 2.5, with more snaking out in every direction or under development. Domestic smartphones selling for more than iPhones. Public bathrooms. Everyone grows vegetables everywhere and the food is so much better than Americanized Chinese cuisine usually is.
Anyhow I could go on and on, it was a really memorable experience, but being there, interacting with Chinese people (guess what? Turns out they’re people like everyone else? Who knew?) just completely blew my old impression out of the water. It made me wish there was more ways for people of different cultures to interact and exchange, because that human connection really defuses a lot of the bullshit tricks that get played on us. I enjoyed seeing that TikTok exodus to the Chinese app last year for this reason.
I accidentally showed up to a tea party protest once. It wasn’t explicit in its purpose and I think it was meant to trick a lot of people into showing up. I know this isn’t the express point of the question, but it was an interesting experience. There were people there from Scandinavian countries talking about how evil socialism is. That was my first sign I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. The second sign and the thing that made me cut and run was:
(CW: Racism) a guy was on the phone with a friend and he was yelling into it “yeah man! We’re tea bagging the black house!” This was during Obama’s administration.
Our Republican state representative was there gladhanding and I walked up to him and said something like “make sure you’re doing your job” or some other libbed up “own” and he laughed it off. I didn’t put 2 and 2 together that he was there to gain support til I had already high tailed it out of there.
I was still in my early twenties and the most leftist stuff we were able to do in our small town was some libbed up anti bush and occupy type protests. At the time, it seemed like it had some power. Now I realize how many Saturdays I wasted.
For at least the first few months when black lives matter protest got big I was an “all lives matter” dipshit. And i was angry that their protest would disrupt my commute. Every time i hear Body Count’s No Lives Matter I’m hit with a massive wave of cringe.
massive wave of cringe
I can’t think of anything at the moment, but there’s definitely a few things for me that bring back memories and feelings of cringe like this.