I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
Israel was justified in their (initial) retaliation for October 7.
Gone so far in the other direction that I now firmly believe Israel should be wiped off the fucking map. Decades of propaganda convinced me they weren’t violent colonizers.
Fuck Israel. From the river to the sea.
That people are smart.
Most people are abject morons who still believe in Iron Age mythology.
that people as a whole are inherently good
nope. nope nope nope. people are inherently selfish
half the population of the world seemingly needs to believe in fairy tales and a magic book to give them a moral code. people will, time and time again, do things for their own convenience or desires at a greater direct and immediate expense to somebody else, i.e. knocking somebody over to spill $10 out of their pockets and only steal $2 and run away.
fuck people. people will get respect when they earn respect. everybody else gets basic decency and nothing more, until they prove they’re not an asshole. and the moment they prove that they are an asshole, they get treated like one.
Eating meat. I used to vaguely mock vegans when I was in college (UK, so 16-18 years old). I used to say shit like “don’t you just miss bacon though” and “the animals already dead, you might as well eat it now or it goes to waste”. I’ve since done a 180 and I’m close to 10 years of veganism. Best decision I ever made for both my health and mental wellbeing.
math is hard, annoying, useless
then found shaders, procedural art, freya holmer.
so math is hard, annoying, beautiful. well not exactly 180 then.
Hanlon’s razor
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
Evil does exist, and it wears the mask of imbecility
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.
Bojler eladó !
Sounds like you’ve seen the worst conservatives have to offer.
It’s sad because there are perfectly sane and decent conservatives all around who aren’t out to break the whole system or aggravate you. They just want lower taxes/regulation.
To me, lowering taxes and lessening regulations sounds like “We don’t want to break the whole system or aggravate you. We just want to make the system worse and make life harder for people who don’t have money”.
The way I see it is that we could have lower taxes for working class people by taxing the rich more and reducing corporate welfare. We wouldn’t even have to compromise on our systems. If you’re in favour of those, that’s awesome – I haven’t met very many conservatives who think that way.
But what’s wrong with regulations? Regulations are what stop corporations from cutting corners on health and safety in the name of profits. And we can see from practices around the world that not only does violating these tend NOT to sway public opinion enough that businesses will stop doing harmful things, but they will knowingly do these things and cause harm to people who couldn’t have known any better beforehand.
Nah that’s not credible any more.
All those people lined right up behind Trump as soon as they got the chance.
I don’t think wanting less regulations is very sane, tbf. Not in this day and age. Not with every other industrialist swapping cereal with sawdust or another flavor of killing people through cost cutting. Regulations are a line of defense for the people, by the people, against the relentless attacks of some industries
I used to make fun of vegans. Now I am one of them x)
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
This is mine, as well. I used to abhor anything negative about Israel. Now I am the one saying presumed abhorrent things.
It does help explain why people can be anti immigrant. Just look at what the “immigrant” Israelis are doing to the native Palestinians…
(I’m not anti immigrant)
True, but let’s make extra clear that Palestinian resistance is completely different than typical western anti immigrant sentiment. There have been Jews, Christians and Muslims living there for centuries. The problem is not that Jews live there or even that many of them moved there at once. It’s that Israelis set up their own government where native population literally have fewer rights
I used to believe that useful idiots were the exception, not the norm.
China bad America less bad.
I think China is no worse than america now. I don’t put effort into buying american products anymore and will happily buy Chinese goods.
Politics. We have always been a conservative family (to relate: “conservative” here is the equivalent of the US Democrats, not Republicans!). My grandfather was a party cofounder and lived next door to our countries first chancellor after the war.
But the sheer disregard for the law by the (conservative) chancellor who was in office when I grew up turned me to the political left.
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.
Frankly, the second one is the bigger deal.
Doesn’t matter how great the engineering is behind it, it’s the human part that scares me.
I suppose that is true of everything in the world though. Cars jump to mind pretty quickly.
And as we can see cars are a disaster in every way shape or form. People routinely misuse them, luckily the harm they do is taking out a family of four as some drunk or distracted driver crashes into them. When a nuclear power plant fails, it takes out an entire city.
But there are many more car accidents, so the cities are taken out anyway, but one family at a time.
I used to be strictly against nuclear energy until like 2025 or so.
I recently looked into it again due to a school project and realized that nuclear energy is actually fine. Renewable energy is still better but nuclear energy is fine. The biggest problem with nuclear energy is high cost; And renewable energy is just nuclear energy with the most difficult parts outsourced (to the sun).
The main problem with nuclear power is that it’s the most expensive form of electricity. People who say otherwise are only looking at the cost of running the generator, rather than including all the true costs involved in generating each watt, which is called the “Levelized Cost Of Electricity” (LCOE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
So there’s no reason to build any new nuclear generators now that renewables+storage are the cheapest form of electricity, and are also the easiest and fastest to build.
I know nuclear is expensive, but power generation isn’t the only reason to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plants basically prop up nuclear science. Without nuclear power plants, you’re hampering the chances of discovering a breakthrough that could lead to cheaper nuclear energy. And you’re pushing back the timeline on fusion.
Also, medical isotopes used for cancer treatments are created in nuclear reactors.
This doesn’t seem like a good argument. More research into renewable and storage technology can also lead to interesting discoveries useful in other fields.
fusion is a pipe dream at this point; nuclear physics has been so thoroughly researched through CERN and other organizations that it’s utterly unlikely that any big break-throughs are gonna happen anytime in the next 100 years.
the only optimization that could still happen is in the reactor design, that is, in everything except the nuclear physics part. stuff like how do you build cheaper plumbing through a 1 m thick concrete wall … not really exciting stuff.
I’m curious how SMRs will end up affecting overall cost of nuclear as well. Once we get into a unit that can be mass produced rather than tailor making each site, I could see the line going down at least a bit and would also allow us to keep pushing those boundaries.
The problem is that LCOE is an imperfect metrics that does not take into account storage properly for grid with high percentage of renewables (that requires significantly more battery storage than current 4h window considered in LCOE). LCOE also does not account completely for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand. There is no clear metric for this, given that the cost depends on the structure of the grid itself and is specific for each country, but the Wikipedia article you posted show in the graph a very incorrect picture. Renewable (solar and wind) + storage is in the $80–150/MWh range, while nuclear is $130–200+/MWh range. It is worth noticing that nuclear cost is very high in Europe and US but can be actually very cheap (reason why china, the world leader on renewable is also world leader on new power plants). Estimation for new Chinese nuclear is at $62/MWh (https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/REupdate/20240927.php)
LCOE also does not account completely for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand
I am unsure why you bring this up seeing as how nuclear power can not react due to load demand and instead only provides base load power, which means other power sources are required to keep up with transient demand.
Nuclear cannot manage fast transient, but for that we have gas peaker and batteries. But nuclear can indeed work in load following mode, with most modern nuclear power plant being able to reduce the amount of power significantly and circle during the day. The French fleet, for example is required to cycle between 20% and 100% twice a day, within 30 minutes. Modern reactors ramps up at 5% each minute.
That means that they can account for changes in demand. More data here: https://www.nice-future.org/docs/nicefuturelibraries/default-document-library/france.pdf
All measures are imperfect, that doesn’t mean it’s totally meaningless and should be disregarded. And it also seems like you’re referencing outdated data, as the cost of battery storage seriously decreased in 2025. But by any measure i can find, nuclear is significantly more expensive than renewables+storage. Regarding China, their data is generally not trustworthy on any topic, but yes I’m sure nuclear can cost a lot less there than elsewhere when you can steamroll over the citizens that would be effected by a powerplant’s construction, operation, and waste storage.
I’m not an expert in this at all, but I believe that private capital isn’t investing their own money in new nuclear construction, and that tells the whole story about the cost per watt of nuclear. If nuclear was cheaper per watt after all costs were considered then private capital would be building new nuclear, but they aren’t, so that means it clearly isn’t.
EDIT
I just looked at your link and it pretty clearly says the opposite of everything you said. Quote from the intro of your article:
[renewable energy] largely prevails over nuclear in China, the United States, and Europe – the world’s three largest power systems, as well as in Japan.
And
New wind and solar projects are much cheaper than new reactors.
I have never disputed that in general solar+storage is cheaper, I am disputing the data in that Wikipedia article that make it looks like it is 20 times cheaper. It is not that much cheaper, and china build lot of nuclear because grid diversification is more valuable then just making it cheaper. Production cost and energy price are independent variables and nuclear bring energy price down as it stabilizes the grid.
Storage cost is going down, but storage demand by energy produced is going up as you need much more storage then just peak hour demand as you are shutting down load following power plant generator like coal, nuclear and gas.
The link I shared is to provide the reference to $62/MWh stated above.
In high school, I was pro-death penalty. As part of a class on politics, I was randomly assigned the anti-death penalty position to research and debate on. I very quickly changed my opinion when I learned about the systemic racism involved. Now I’m an anarchist
That escalated randomly.
Death penalty carceral state - carceral state - state -
state
I think I’m starting to lean that way as well, I definitely understand society and norms are an illusion of structure, but I used to think it was good, productive, now I think that theater is hurting us.
When people stop working towards the structure and begin to exploit it instead…
yep exactly. I really am just wondering how much this is recent failures or has it just always been this fucked up and we were sold lies growing up.
I used to be anti-death. Now I am in the pro-death camp. This is because if a 2nd American War is concluded, we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons. Do we really want to house members of ICE in our prisons for life, or allow them to once again walk the streets they terrorized? Members of the Trump Regime willfully given up their humanity in all the ways.
I cannot help but feel that executing them all will allow us to allocate more resources towards the people who matter: children, immigrants, and others who still have their humanity.
I feel that but also recoginize the inherent dark irony.
It is called the tolerance paradox. If you want a truly tolerant society you can’t tolerate intolerance.
Yeah. It is problematic: On one paw, it is definitely evil to kill people. On the other, it is also evil to allow rapists, thieves, and murderers to have a high chance of doing so again.
It sucks. 😞
we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons
Conveniently they’ve been building tons of prisons that could be put to use for this
No. Those aren’t fit for human habitation in the first place.
Don’t worry, when you graduate high school you’ll drop the anarchist bit, too.
Because grown ups are capitalists ?
Obviously, it varies, but a thing often happens where as you’re exposed to the details of how the world works (in person) you start to realise the generations who came before and made it weren’t total idiots.
Thinking it all makes sense isn’t where that goes, but “a monopoly on the use of force is probably necessary” or “markets are more airtight than people think” can be.
Speak for yourself. All kinds of groups from conservatives to liberals to fascists to communists (although let’s be honest, it’s mostly the conservatives and liberals and ‘enlightened centrists’) love to arrogantly imply that their current worldview is the mature, rational conclusion that any intelligent person should reach in adulthood, and any other is just childish, naive, and poorly conceived. The people who do this aren’t speaking to anything concrete about the world, they’re just high on their own farts and confident in their ignorance.
And it’s the anarchists who catch the bulk of the sneering insults from these types, who will often demonstrate their own ignorance as they dismiss them as naive and uninformed. You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
Oh? Which ideology on that list the push for, then? I’m in the picture, I used to agree with OP on a lot and now I agree on less, but can you even guess how?
Nothing is being sold here, I literally just listed a couple anarchist things OP believes. Learning as you get older is a real phenomenon, at least for most people. And, there’s no shortage of older people who have more complex, less absolute ideas about any number of things than they did when they were younger.
You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
I used a different word on purpose, because capitalism doesn’t really have a consistent definition. According to Hexbear, China isn’t capitalist despite having all the associated features, for example.
Alright, I’ll have a go at guessing your ideology since you asked. Given your status quo preference (“the generations before us aren’t stupid and things are the way they are for a good reason”), you’re not a radical so that leaves conservative, liberal, or centrist. Given you’ve implied that you used to have some anarchist beliefs it’s unlikely you went from that to conservative, so most likely you’re some flavor of liberal, like a social democrat. You’re vaguely sympathetic to some socialist and anarchist ideas but think you’re too smart to commit to them because the world is “just more complicated than that.” Capitalist realism has pulled you back from becoming a radical as you’ve gotten older.
Actually, you pretty much nailed it, nice. TBF that makes it kind of a trick question, since it’s not neatly in any of the categories.
Do you think the world isn’t complicated? Even anarchists usually do. If anything, you see the argument that the world is too complicated to be reduced to numbers and laws.
Nah, it’s just that eventually you realize there is more to life that questioning your parents and wearing black.
Edit: Don’t worry, you can still circle your As.
oh look, it’s someone who doesn’t know what anarchism is
I know what anarchism is and I think it a utopian thought experiment.
Like every single political ideology you rube
I mean, other ideologies, support them or hate them, have at least existed in the real world at a mass scale.
So you’re saying human civilization always operated under a hierarchical body politic without decentralized decision making?
Serious ahistorical claim.
By the way “anarchy” in the sense of childish movie plot stuff is not what any adherent of the ideology is about. Anarchy is a spectrum and set of guiding principles (like any political belief system), and one can argue that forms of what I might identify as anarchistic political structures have and do exist in many political systems. Just like socialism exists in neoconservative governments, and fascism in democracy ect…
Anarchism can run a small commune but not modern societies like China or the USA. Let real leftists build movements that actually succeed in reality and not at the scale of like a couple hundred people.
Let me guess, you use Linux?
what gave it away, the website I’m on or the posts I made?
I didn’t even look at your post history. It’s just that Linux users and defenders of Anarchism as a true system of power have a very narrow Venn diagram.
You’re in wrong neighborhood pal lol
whatever. I’m not interested in discussing anything with someone this caustic. I didn’t say “humanity must become anarchists” I said “you don’t know what anarchy is”
And I’m not interested in having a conversation with someone who can’t even pick a side of the fence to argue from. I hear the Libertarians are recruiting, maybe they are more your flavor.
I only became an anarchist in my 30s. Before that I was authleft.
I thought America were the good guys…
