Ask Lemmy

There was a time I actually thought that Elon Musk wanted to help save the planet by making electric cars mainstream to displace fossil fuel vehicles, and by helping humanity return to space simply for the science and exploration value.

Musk's "some kind of pedo guy" comment about the diver that dismissed Musk's efforts with the cave children was the first WTF moment, but I wrote that off has him just having a bad day as he apologized later. Musk fighting the COVID lockdown was also more evidence that concerned me. This was all before Elon's embrace of trump and GOP Nazism, and long before Elon's double Nazi salute on national television.

Divisive propaganda got me to vote for Jill Stein in 2016. I would still assert that Clinton was an awful candidate, but I should have voted for her.

When I was a kid, I watched Chinese dramas about the war of resistance against japanese invasion, and it portrayed the CCP as heroes...

The main fighting force was actually the ROC Army lol

I used to have more positive views on PRC, but then my mom told me about One Child Policy and I wasn't supposed to exist...

so yea, my opinion changed pretty quickly

No way in hell I'd support an organization that wanted to legislate me out of existence, also denying legal paperwork after I was born.

Also, cops.

I used to think they actually protect people, now I know they are just a bunch of useless assholes that sometimes harass innocent people. They never help with anything, always have this aggressive attitude, does injust arrests.

This view isn't based on the internet, it's from actual real life experiences.

I believed the USA was a liberal democracy full of concerned citizens. I also had faith in the financial system at one point!

Elon Musk in his early days. He was fresh, convincing and his ideas sounded good. It turns out they sounded a bit too good. With hindsight he really is the world greatest con-man. Why this still goes on its beyond me, though.

I was raised insane and religious and ended up listening to Alex Jones every day for a year or two in highschool. I was also insufferable about it.

If you work hard, are honest, and moral, you will get ahead in life.

It was embarrassingly late in life before I realized how much of a farce that was.

I thought the Mueller report was going to be a big bombshell and end a bunch of shit but it did almost less than nothing.

I thought "loose change" had more merit than it did when it came out. still sus on wtc7.

i thought 'What the bleed do we know" had more merit when I first saw it.

so there, I admit being human and getting swept up in confirmation bias, etc.

I once watched a documentary on all-natural child birth. I remember it made some believable points about how terrible epidurals were and how bath tubs and pools were better methods for birthing, all the while vilifying the medical establishment for not giving women choices.

I ate it all up thinking doctors were bastards for this until I finished my second semester at college for my medicine-adjacent degree. Oh, the shame!

In college I fell pretty deep into the nopoo conspiracy, that shampoo manufacturers get you addicted to the cycle of stripping off your hair's natural sebum and replacing it with conditioner that attracts dirt... literally rinse, repeat.

I think I was frustrated that I couldn't figure out how to take care of my scalp and hair, and here was this social group with an explanation and a scapegoat.

I still think that shampooing every day is probably too much for me, and embraced mechanical cleaning, but I've relaxed the conspiracy thinking.

For the record Jonestown didn’t use real Kool Aid

Calories in, calories out.

For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.

After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn't access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn't really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.

It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn't sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).

Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).

If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.

I used to believe tae-kwon-do was good for self defence... But all that kicking is not useful in an actual fight where people can punch you in the face.

A lot of the martial arts have rules that makes them bad in a actual fight. Its a bit strange that they even have those rules if the objective is to be good at fighting.

I used to be a bit of a Microsoft shill, after the first known knowledge of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.”

I saw them as an underdog in topics like the phone market, gaming, and a few other subjects, and wanted the competitors to try a bit harder instead of controlling market dominance. I’m still sad MS lost out with their HTML5 engine and went to WebKit - even if I root Firefox, having more competitors against WebKit is a good thing.

What shifted me over was first, them firing the team that made Hi-Fi Rush, Xbox’s ONLY claim to GOTY, and then learning how much they lick Netanyahu’s boots. My PC runs Linux now.

I tried so hard to be a Pentecostal Christian.

But they were flouncing about and I was just... standing there. Aghast.

Everyone was crying in the ecstasy of religious fervour and despite the emotional high I, wasn't.

I haven't drank the kool aid. Kind of a shit answer to this question TBH but there it is.

When did I succumb?

Okay. Here's as close as I got.

It's early 2000's.

I am in Whitehorse, YK.

I am am a supervisor for a contract inventory company.

We are waiting, around 40+ of us in the cold, to inventory the Walmart up there at 5:30am in the morning.

To be clear, some of us were up at 3:30am when it was still sunny out the "night before" living our best lives.

There is a drunk, and high, native. He's in the parking lot we're all gathering in. And he's making everyone uncomfortable. He's bouncing around a bunch of people who have no idea how to deal with him but I see he's got a line I can understand...

Me, being me, decides my white ass (I have a lot of indigenous ancestry that isn't readily apparent) gets it.

So while 50+ people make a circle around him, I walk up to him. Sit down, and talk to him.

He tells me about the Sun God.

I am an atheist, then I was more agnostic but close enough.

And y'know what?

He tries, maybe in spite,, maybe* because*, he was high as a kite, to sell me on the Sun God.

And, he does.

I am Atheist. There are no gods, no Divinity. No souls. But I mother, fuckin, listen.

If I were to believe in a god, as an atheist, The Sun God would be it.

Because of this high, random ass fuckin' native who sold me on it in a parking lot while the 50 other people watched and judged him without actually listening didn't actually listen.

Pentecostal god: believe in me despite no reason to.

Sun God: I am a FUCKING SUN. I give warmth, I am here, on time. Every day. I am life sustaining. I create and I destroy.

I'm still an atheist, I don;t actually believe in the sun god, but if, as an atheist, I was pinned down? The Sun God is about as close as I could get to divinity.

I used to believe in god about 45 years ago, does that count?

Once thought that Google eas a great company and earnt evil.

Not sure I got sucked into anything like conspiracy theories, but as far as "I swear this is my life now" I have quite a few. I have ADHD and with it comes the usual fleeting obsession with hobbies. It gets expensive and I always end up abandoning it for something else. Then I feel sad because I spent a ton of money that ultimately didn't result in anything permanent.

When I was going hard with ham radio I dug a huge trench in my backyard and installed a grounding system connected to the house ground, now I barely use my radios. Same with the KX3 I bought. It's an eye-wateringly expensive portable radio. My excuse was it was a reward for passing a difficult certification exam and I would use it all the time in the park near my house. That turned out not to be the case.

I actually genuinely believed for awhile as a kid/young adult that ADHD was a gift and that society wouldn't try to strangle and kill me for having it in a million ways.

I drank the atheist nihilistic hedonism kool aid when I was a kid (Christianity is too contradictory and that soured my view on belief in general) and I didn't get out of that "lol I just wanna have fun, what's personal responsibility?!" Ideological hole until my mid 20s. 🥲

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000

I believed I was a man.