2016 US elections was a ridiculously sobering moment for realizing that we had not progressed nearly to the extent that I nievely thought.
This one rings home pretty hard. I’ve definitely viewed the people around me differently since then. And especially since covid as well.
Agreed, Covid ties or is a close runner up for me as well in terms of people showing their true colors.
2016 and the following four years were eyeing opening on just how far away from even okay a majority of the US is.
Yeah but it was the election that was the "event". At the time i thought it must have been an aberration, it was during the following years I realised it was a symptom of the real problem.
Up until that point, I was a naive centrist that thought sane liberalism would win out. That election single-handedly destroyed that view and slammed me hard to the left.
I'm not even from the US and honestly it was a sobering moment for me as well. I realised how people like Hitler get into power. Before 2016 I knew it was possible like cognitively but Trump being elected made it feel real in a way it never had before.
Same for my country (Hungary). For the first time almost all off the opposition parties agreed to merge into eachother, then the chosen opposition president almost became the old corrupt guy's wife (old people voted for them), then the Ukraine már happened where everyone knew Orbán made a ton of contracts with Putin, LITERALLY disses Zelensky but never mentions Putin's name and Orbán won with a record 2/3 again.
Hungarian people literally can't remember about 1956, it seems.
I have thought a lot about the "How do background characters tell if they're in a story?" thing a lot since.
The day the alternate timeline stopped being a meme. The day "we're in too damned interesting times to this not be the end of humanity" became a reality.
If the world burns, whatever. We have had it coming.
COVID-19. People simply refused to do the absolute minimum to stop the spread of the virus. At least in my community, everyone was still socializing with friends and family (without a mask, of course), going out to eat, taking part in recreational activities with other people. Something as simple as "stay away from other people until we get this under control" was too hard for the American public. It certain changed my view of the people around me.
Same, it really bumped up my pessimism regarding people
For me it definitely highlighted how many people in American society think they are the main character and fuck everyone else.
Welcome to *The ME Show! *
Starring: Me!
Co-starring: (fuck) you!
Actions > Talk. They were telling you their true views. People rarely say the quiet part(their views) out loud so it is valuable to be able to translate their actions into their true views.
When you know how others truly feel, it allows you to decide who is worth listening to. Not to say you shouldn't listen to people with different views, but instead decide whether they are telling you their beliefs or telling you what they think you want to hear(BSing you) and use that rate how trustworthy they are on the topic.
Haha I remember a talking head saying at the start that this could bring humanity closer together and I sat laughing in my couch for a minute
I mean this is a pretty big one for most people, but march 2020 COVID lockdowns. My family and I were bunkered down like the family in the movie Signs, just trying to figure out what was going on and keeping each other safe.
It was a bizarre time. I remember going to the supermarket - it felt like an apocalypse with boxes of stock being torn open by shoppers instead of unpacked by staff. Stuff all over the floors. People pushing / pulling multiple trolleys.
It made me realise how close we are to chaos.
Covid made me realise just how much we live in different versions of reality and how harmful that is during a crisis that requires everyone to be on the same page. At the beginning of the lockdowns I joked about how some people would rather die than comply with basic public health practices....and then it actually fucking happened in real life. Not only that but they took down other people with them. Not such a funny joke anymore.
I was an essential worker who had zero time off and the empty streets at all hours were nuts. I am back at a normal job now where people did lock down, and everyone had a mass experience that I did not.
The 2008 bank bailouts. Watching our government spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out some unelected bankers who made some bad decisions and were "too big to fail (true)". Watching them spend that money on bonuses for their execs, while none of them went to jail. Watching the social response to that (occupy) and then watching a coordinated federal crackdown of those protests across the country. And then watching bailouts happen again and again since then. Meanwhile in Iceland, they overthrew their government over it. The global financial system has deeply rooted flaws, and bailouts are an inevitability in it. We will inevitably, every so often, make another huge wealth transfer like that because so longs as lending exists, particularly private lending, and all banks are interconnected so that if one fails they all fail, there will always be bank runs and bailouts. Even the most well-intentioned bank cannot hedge against all risks and market shocks. And the government will just turn on the money printer every time it happens while you watch your hard-earned money lose its value.
Covid. I used to think people were basically good and caring, trying to do the right thing. I also used to think that everyone besides me was better at dealing with stress.
Turned out my life really is so bad that a global pandemic actually reduced my stress level. And when other people are stressed, they use that as an excuse to treat everyone else abominably. People are fundamentally selfish and self-centered. Kindness is at best a veneer for the vast majority.
Kindness is at best a veneer for the vast majority.
I admire your clarity of thought here.
The pandemic did reduce my stress level temporarily by getting me away from people pleasing behavior but it also made me feel kinda jaded about people for a while.
I like your username. How did you come up with it if you don't mind sharing?
Thanks!
I really love analogies. People make fun of me for it, and I don't even mind. I used to have friends play a game where one would name a random object, and another a random intangible and I'd have to come up with an analogy to explain the latter using the former.
Let me offer a counterexample. I was in NYC on 9/11. I saw the first tower burning and I saw the second plane hit. I watched incredulously when they fell.
The entire city froze. It was the first and only time NYC went silent. No cars, no construction, no one yelling. There has to have been at least 5000 people packed into a large crowd outside of Penn station, but no one was shoving or yelling for them to open the doors.
NY actually stated like that for a while. It was surreal - it felt like a dream. But the city really did come together. People were more kind and helpful to strangers. They were more aware of their neighbors and their needs. People were handing out food and blankets on the streets, trying to get through the massive disruption. I saw no rioting, no crime surge despite the fact that emergency services were completely tied up.
Yes. People react differently to acute vs. chronic stress. I've seen it time and again. People are happy to help if it's short-term. Then they get the feel-goods. But if there's nothing in it for them, if they feel inconvenienced by ongoing suffering, charity dries up like tears in the Sahara. Very few are willing to be kind even when they don't get to feel like a hero doing it.
All that follows is simply an opinion. Take everything with a grain of salt. Feel free to discuss.
Human are social creatures and relationships is a basic human need. Where I am from, the government enforced a curfew and stopped people from having relationships with their loved one. Stories of people dying alone or women giving birth alone.
When basic needs aren't met, we revert to survival instincts and try to meet these needs. To me, that explains why people that were seemingly caring turned out to be dicks when their needs weren't met.
Shitty people were going to be shitty anyways.
For people that need less social interactions, it feels like it's fucking bonkers how people were getting desperate for social interactions and throwing caution to the wind. It felt like they were crazy.
Just like an hungry man in front of a plentiful buffet, these people tasted social interactions and told themselves never again!
It was a short time in history where less social people were better off than the rest. After covid brought a lot of tension because social persons clawed back at what was acquired by the less social people.
And to me, that explains a lot of what we saw and see right now.
And again, shitty people are gonna be shitty people regardless of the situation, so that observation doesn't apply to them.
I might not have been a raging, bleeding-heart, anti-capitalist liberal had Trump not gotten elected in November 2016. Until then I might have considered myself apolitical with no strong political ambitions. Seeing the post-election riots/protests opened up the world to me, his election wasn't a stupid joke but an injustice on all the people Trump essentially campaigned on fucking over.
Another crazy moment was the second time I got high on weed. I was super panicked at first, but when I went to bed, all of a sudden abstract art made sense to me as I had visions and felt a connection to their work even if I didn't know their name. That high had residual effects the next day and I had felt changed somehow.
Sorry but "anti capitalist liberal"? But liberalism is capitalism
yea I had the same reaction. In the US I think it bears a different meaning, they equate liberal with the left. Even though it hardly makes sense, it's the usage
GWB publicly condoning torture.
I grew up during the tail end of the cold war. Torture was something the Soviets did. We were better than that.
And sure, I knew the CIA did stuff like that under the table, but it was never OK.
It's what got me interested in politics, and why I feel that we shouldn't try to hide the bad things we've done when we teach history. Knowing what we're capable of is necessary to keep ourselves from repeating the mistakes of the past.
we 'shouldn’t' try to hide the bad things we’ve done when we teach history
The keyword here is shouldn't. Most people don't do lots of things they should.
Not out of malice but simply laziness, it is a lot easier to just default to the norm and go on. Try comparing what should get done in politics(campaign promises) to what actually gets done in washington. In short what should happen and what actually happens are two different things in a lot of areas.
Snowden file leaks lead me down the path to privacy and to reading books like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Lead me down the path to degoogling and linux and now decentralized services like Lemmy.
It seems like every week some article comes out with big tech abusing their rights. This week was Philips hue and last week or so it was a mom getting 2 years in jail because Facebook gave up information about her giving abortion pills to her daughter.
I am using all these foss services myself and making my friends and family use them and be aware of these events. It's a slow car crash and if people are apathetic and say "I have nothing to hide" and eventually "I have nothing to say", soon we'll be stripped of more rights until it's too late.
“The cells of death row are filled with guys who had nothing to hide.” - Kenneth Eade
Snowden trully opened the world's eyes bruv...
This sealed the deal for me and went FOSS
Microsoft using "off-shore" dns, like a druglord or something got me pretty annoyed, swallowed the linux pill whole! Bash scripting and all
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- 9/11
- Bush v Gore
- GWB re-election (despite war, recession, etc.)
- Trump election
- COVID
All chipped away at notions of stability, fairness, and sanity.
Still have hope, but tend not to believe the hype so much.
I'll throw one out for COVID, but not just the lockdowns or the immediate work changes. It was more about how the deaths kept happening. And happening. And happening. Yet people still failed to take it seriously, even to the point of rebelling against seemingly common-sense safeguards like vaccines, masking, and staying the fuck home.
In the US, we lived through about 4 years of shenanigans and bullshit and lies from an incompetent federal government leading up to the pandemic. But surely that wouldn't fly for long. You can lie about the number of people at a rally (because who the fuck cares), you can apparently lie about where a hurricane is projected to go (because it's jUsT a PrOjEcTiOn or something), but surely you can't bullshit your way out of a pandemic. Hospitals at capacity. Bodies piling up. Loved ones lost. Visible, real, tangible impacts of poor leadership and poor decisionmaking.
But, turns out you can. Even in the most dire of circumstances, you can still convince people that reality isn't real. Or even if it is, it doesn't really matter and it's not their problem. And there are enough people out there who will buy into that message that it will ruin things for everyone else.
Edit: To the original point of the question... I guess I had a little more faith in humanity before all that happened. More faith that real-world consequences would win out against rhetorical bullshit and tribalism.
reality isn’t real
It is worth keeping in mind Hanlon's Razor with this. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect." They are running on emotions and accepting being wrong hurts so they simply don't accept their emotions.
Being treated for cancer in hospital (in remission now, thank you) during COVID lockdowns gave me lots of time to reflect on my life. Realised that probably I was the asshole all these years; and also came to the realisation that I’m autistic and socially awkward. Reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs helped me to understand all the corporate games and garbage that I’d been part of for most of my career.
When I think about my life, it’s divided into pre-cancer diagnosis, selfish workaholic and part of corporate life; and post-cancer remission, unemployed, living off my savings, kinder to the people and the world, but unable to find a job that resonates with the new me.
For me it was when I was watching Soul with some friends and eventually came to some emotional realizations. I realized that I only had a superficial understanding of how to communicate. I could discuss ideas in the abstract, but I had trouble with expressing myself emotionally and personally because I was always conditioned to repress how I feel. I guess like 22 in the movie I only saw myself as a casual observer. It took a couple rewatches for me to process the difficult emotions I was feeling into something I could explain but when I did it really helped my overall mental outlook on life.
The left wing party of Australian federal politics decided that treating refugees inhumanly was acceptable.
That moment changed how I view politics and how I view people. It made me realise just how irrelevant empathy for others was in most public and political discourse. It made me more cynical about "the system", changed the way I voted, and transformed the face of my own advocacy to put empathy for others at the forefront.
Yeah, I spent a few years raging about this also.
Basically in the 2013 election the Australian voting public decided that they preferred treating refugees inhumanely rather than the alternatives.
It sucks, and yes it changed the way I see the world, but I don't really see that as Labor's fault, or the Greens. There are so many important issues that I want them to advocate for, that clinging to the moral high ground over an issue which is (according to voting populace) closed and resolved would seem like a waste.
Your last paragraph, and realising that that is how most people think is part of why it was such a profound moment for me.
Ignoring human rights abuses does not make them closed and resolved. Nor do I care for any other issues they're advocating for if the price is ongoing erasure of basic human rights.
Trump
winninggetting carried by the EVs made me a bitter, jaded, hopeless husk. I lost faith in the republic, in america, in people, in common sense...I don't know if I ever truly recovered.
Come to think of it, i've lived through at least two instances where the direct opposition of the public's will have lead to death, suffering, and the collapse of represenative democracy: Bush v Gore, and the Trump Presidency. Odd how that's a common trend.
What's EVs?
COVID. Really never understood before how little of a shit the U.S. government has for its people. But they straight up let us fucking die while telling teenagers they needed to get back to work for minimum wage so they could get their shit Mcdildos and mochafuckaccinos and add gold spinning rims to their yachts. I can't wait until these old fucks start dying off, I don't care what political leanings they claim to have, we need a fuckin overhaul.
Even more so I was shocked at how little care a lot of people have for others in general.
Not how I view the world, but how I view USA and "citizens of the free world".
In 2016 my girlfriend and I visited New York - for me, first time visiting USA. I had a co-worker who lived in USA for most of her childhood, so I asked her if she had some advice for me to get along with people I met on my way.
"Never underestimate the stupidity of Americans".
I thought that to be rude as I had "talked" with many Americans on Reddit and sure, there were idiots, but that didn't define a person from USA for me.
We arrived in New York and took a cab to the hotel. The driver asked us "So, is Donald Trump making headlines in Europe?" (This was during the 2016 election).
I laughed and told him "Yeah, can you believe people will vote on such a moron"...
Oh no I didn't... He was furious, as Donald Trump was the Saviour of USA and he was singlehandedly going to "clean up the swamp" or whatever his catchphrase was.. and then he said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.
"90% of Muslims are terrorists and if you don't kill them, they will kill you"..
I know not all Americans are this dumb, but I learned my lesson.... Never underestimate the stupidity of Americans.
It can be applied elsewhere too. Whenever politics come up, it's wise to initally talk about it in a neutral state.
Well, yes, but where I'm from the topic "Donald Trump" is not a political one, it's more of a "will you look at that shit show".
A lot has changed since 2016 and I will most definitely approach every subject in a neutral state, as I feel like more and more people are getting more stupid by the hour.
Losing everything. My family wasn't rich but it was well off, and in my young stupidity I thought we deserved to live better than others did because we worked hard (had a family business).
Turns out hard work means almost jack shit. I mean, I'm good now because I have very marketable skills and I do work hard at a job not many want to do, but it takes me around the world and I can tell you, fucking everything in life depends on luck, starting from where you are born.I can tell you, fucking everything in life depends on luck, starting from where you are born.
Now my friend, you are wiser than ever before!
It's called "Ecclesiastes 9:11"
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
starting from where you are born
This, too... how you are born dictates how (routes) to get to the riches. (Thats why some connections are useless) still; luck will find you wherever and whoever you are, its up to you to grab it firm.
I dropped everything in my twenties to look after a dying family member.
Thought my family would support me when all was said and done. I left a very promising career to do this.
Everyone just kind of went their seperate ways and I almost ended up homeless. While my dad immediately found another woman, took all his money and fucked off.
I'm just starting to recover almost a decade later.
I'm kind these days, I think. But I'm not nice.
The whole "the world will end in 2012" hysteria back then. It was my first glimpse into conspiracy theories, which I've spent a lot of time learning about ever since. It made me realize that nothing is ever too idiotic to not have an alarming number of people fall for it. It's why I wasn't surprised by the rise of the Q-movement or the resistance against the absolute bare minimum of COVID measures because of microchips in vaccines etc. All of that were just yet additional "of course people believe that shit"-moments for me.
Like Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black "A person is smart - people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals."
I haven't been surprised by how stupid people can be in a long time.
Actually, how did the 2012 thing became such a viral trend? Literally even news sites aired it SEVERAL times here, and I already thought that's it was a dumb conteo story. (I was 11 then)
As someone who was in his late teens then, I don't think many people really seriously believed that the world was going to end in 2012. It was more of a running joke. I remember that a few days before the 21st of December, someone posted on a forum for students of the university I was then attending that exam results were going to be posted on the 21st; someone else responded "oh, so for some who took this course the world will actually end on that day".
It was the end of a ~5,000 year cycle in a mayan calendar or something.
In retrospect, was probably the Battle of Seattle in 1999. Not that I wasn't aware of the issues before, but that really ripped off the mask to show me that the U.S. is fundamentally rotten at its core: The police are not the good guys, they don't serve and protect, they are there to visit violence on the enemies of capital. And if innocent people in their homes or going to work get caught up and harmed, fuck 'em, they're not wealthy enough to matter. The media will flat-out lie to maintain the good-cops-vs.-evil-protesters narrative. Our leaders will eagerly sell out American citizens to the interests of global capital, with only lip service to democratic traditions. And Americans are too disengaged to really question any of it.
For me, it provided the keys to understanding the events since, from Bush v. Gore to today. At least now the rot has become so obvious that the younger generations are forced to notice.
Never heard of the Battle of Seattle. What was it about?
It was the result of anti-World Trade Organization protests organized at the group's gathering in Seattle in 1999. Basically, the police see protesters axiomatically as bad, so they showed up in riot gear and started a riot. The media reported it as violent protestors, despite some of the people who just lived nearby and were trying to get to and from work getting caught up, kettled, teargassed, and beaten alongside protesters. I wasn't there, but the Internet had become a thing, and IndyMedia.org had lots of first-person coverage. It was the same pattern we've seen ever since cell phones with cameras have become ubiquitous: The video shows that the cops get violent and then lie about it.
For me it was an array of events.
The war in Afghanistan (I was a kid but this was one of the tipping points that sent me down a hard leftist path).
GWB… just collectively. Freezing when told the towers were hit; lying about WMDs so he could start an illegal war.
Watching Obama get elected and then turning out to be a fucking fraud that built the drone program and carried on the US legacy of being the worldwide terrorist organization.
A big one though was watching the police continue to terrorize the Black community over and over. Years ago on Facebook I had a couple of old high school friends that argued with me that you should do whatever a cop tells you. My response was to tell them how utterly fucking idiotic that was and that cops will violate your rights if it means they don’t have to do any paperwork. They’ll illegally search your vehicle (like they did mine one time), harass you (like they did to my friends and I when we were skateboarding), and if you’re Black, they’ll shoot you in the back if you run.
Needless to say, I am not friends with either of them anymore. I think that’s when I really started to solidify who I was and have rejected absolutely everything that America is and does on the world stage. I’ve become known as the white guy that hates cops. I’ve worked with Black revolutionary groups, activist groups, written articles and tons of thoughts on police violence in America, and have marched against the police on multiple occasions. Hell, the police have surveilled me for who knows how long a few years ago, and I know people that have been under surveillance by the FBI. As an aside, you’d be amazed at the lengths this country will go to to keep eyes on peace activists.
Everything America does as a collective has brought me to the conclusion that we are in a failed state, capitalism-in-decay freefall that I’m afraid we will never recover from. We no longer innovate; we continue to loot other countries; we are all a captive audience hitched to whatever whims the capitalists and other ghouls want.
I’ve been laid off, had companies fuck me over for money and control, harassed by cops (all the way back to when I was 15 in the 90s), tracked by my own government for having a voice… there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me that the United States isn’t the enemy of the world and it’s citizens are nothing more than a disposable capitalist resource.
I hate to be a downer but my view of this country is a product of what it has done to both its own people and people around the world. I feel like a prisoner in the US.
Dubya and his crew were something else, weren’t they? I knew right from the get-go that the whole Iraq thing was a lie. It was just so obvious from their demeanor and body language, and the talking points they chose. Their goofy “evidence,” and the way they got offended when questioned about it. Like, how did everybody not see that?
For me, it wasn't a global event, but a personal one. I had a conversation on reddit with a Texan piano teacher who had the fantasy of murdering and eating people. Her view was that if it was OK to kill any sentient beings, as there was no legitimate reason to draw a line between farmed animals and people. She argued her point well, and I couldn't come up with a counterargument that didn't also imply we shouldn't eat animals.
It was a bizzare conversation, but it made me really reconsider my personal morals, and totally changed the path of my life.
pretty trivial counterpoint though: there are plenty of sentient animals that aren't even remotely sapient, and animals like chickens frankly rather deserve to be eaten as they are quite terrible creatures who will blithely peck their flockmates to a slow and miserable death.
Chickens tend to get along OK if you don't cram them in where they have no room to move. They actually make for quite affectionate companions if socialized properly. Nurture plays a huge role in animal behavior as well, and usually animals (including humans) simply tend to lash out when their needs aren't being met.
If you spend some time looking into modern animal cognition research, you'll notice the line around sapience is a very blurry one, with many animals routinely demonstrating that they are capable of complex spatial reasoning, theory of mind, and other traits we used to think only humans were capable of.
Also, you'll find plenty of humans are quite terrible creatures as well. That doesn't mean we can treat them indiscriminately. The capacity to suffer only requires sentience.
Anyways, I didn't come here to argue. Just to share my experience.
It's funny that people can't see this point, sometimes even when told to their faces. Logically, putting belief aside, you are either okay with some sort of cannibalism, murder and rape, or you should turn vegan.
That's a bit extreme, murder an cannibalism I can understand the connection with, but rape? I might be missing something but I'm pretty sure nobody forces intercourse on animals destined for consumption.
As for murder and cannibalism, there have been historical instances where that was the case when they ran out of food (low-hanging fruit). I would wager that given a grave enough scenario, people will be grilling up Neighbour Bob to stay alive. Zombie apocalypse time might just mean long pork's on the menu.
Once computers went online. It was fascinating to experience in real time.
It's kind of shit now though.
I think the closest is when i discovered Not Just Bikes, that unlocked the whole "people are affected by how their environment is designed" thing in my brain and since then i've just kept on down that road and now i'm a turbosocialist who thinks 95% of cars should be immediately scrapped.
I stumbled onto the same idea through Podcast Your undivided attention produced by humanetech.
The word should is subjective. Anytime you see it understand that that idea is just their opinion. And people have lots of bad opinions.
people are affected by how their environment is designed
If you really want a brainfuck apply this to your content consumption habits. Negative environment = discourage use. Positive environment = encourage it. Unfortunately anything designed to be addictive(like facebook) can be a negative environment, even if it makes you temporarily happy because of dopamine if you misuse it.
2016 elections and then covid. Now nazis rising to power again.
Ditto.
Tripping too hard on mushrooms. I realized that the mind is powerful, and under the right conditions, can show you and make you believe that reality is absolutely anything. And I mean anything. You could be anywhere, anyone, become an inanimate object, have your world become pure geometry and sensation, completely lose sense of the scale and passage of time. There are almost no limits.
Yep, it’s they key lesson of psychedelics: reality is an illusion, never underestimate the power of the mind and how much it lives literally in its own world. Be mindful of biases and prejudices corrupting the very notion of truth, be sympathetic to those with mental health issues and trauma and be mindful of just how ubiquitous a problem mental health is and how important working on yourself is.
I got glasses. That definitely changed the way I saw things. Everything suddenly became more focused.
Witnessing a downtown metro area go dead silent, years of ecological damage reversed and folding at home accidentally out computing the world's fastest supercomputer in the first 2 weeks of 2020 lock downs and all it took was giving 10 days PTO to all non-essential workers (I was essential btw but yes I'll fucking survive Starbucks being closed one fortnight a year)
Surely, people will see this as worthwhile and positive tradition and we'll collectively decide to avoid commuting for 2 weeks every March; taking PTO if offered or job hopping at the new market rate created if not, right... Right...?
2016 Brexit referendum -> Turkish coup-> trump presidential win
It reinforced all my feelings about what was important in this world and simultaneously made very clear we are actually living in an age of sliding back, not of Progress. I was already very interested in politics by that point but with just about the knowledge to grab the weight but no proper explanation this summer half of 2016 felt like falling into chaos and uncertainty 3 times. In retrospect the outer two likely had much more influence on my life thereafter, but the middle one was the more jarring to watch unfold at the time.
9/11.
I didn’t think much about the dangers of religion and “faith” in general until then.
And with that, do you mean rather the fundamentalists crashing into the towers or the hawks starting two wars?
Porque no los dos?
2020 george floyd protests
even during protests about police brutality they did even more police brutality
it's never going to stop. the system has too many meaningless pressure valves that they've convinced people are actually valuable [writing a letter to a local official, voting (depending what state), clever chants during protests, etc]
The war in Iraq. It was bullshit and everyone knew it was bullshit, but it happened because politicians forced it through. 9/11 was a horrific disaster but the war in Iraq that followed left me completely jaded.
Finally seeing sense and not believing religion anymore changed everything.
And oddly enough, it all started because of an X-Men movie.
I would love to hear the train from x men to atheism
It was X-Men Apocalypse.
I was working in a call center at the time, and there were tvs around the room on mute with closed captions that we could look at in between being on a call. I actually didn't work in a department that took calls at the time, so I would watch entire shows like this sometimes.
Anyway, the trailer for this movie came on during a commercial break, and there was one scene (I forget the exact quote- I might have to check YouTube for it now, but you'll see it if you look it up) that was taking about the four horsemen, and mentioned that Christianity wasn't the first to use that metaphor, but that it has been used by a bunch of religions and people groups before.
So that threw me for a loop and made me start wondering. And once I figured out that one thing I always heard specifically about the belief was wrong, it made me wonder what else was wrong.
So once I stopped taking everything for granted as just being true because "the Bible says it is" and started looking at it honestly, it quickly turned into realizing that it was all bullshit. As soon as you stop assuming it's all completely true no matter what the evidence said, and actually take reality into account (for anyone that didn't grow up as a believer this sounds totally insane, but that's really how it be), a lot of things snap into focus.
I had a roommate I completely disagreed with at the time, but I started taking him a lot more seriously after that. Turns out he wasn't crazy, I was.
And that's the short version. I don't recall enough specifics to really make a long version, but you get the idea.
Edit- typos
Russia's invasion of Ukraine made me realize the fundamental wisdom of the saying "Speak softly and carry a big stick".
When I was a child I had a neighbor who was a mentally challenged adult woman. I learned how cruel life can be. I didn't understand why some have it worst than others. But I also learn to appreciate and be grateful for what I have.
Finding out in primary school that other kids weren't poor and had all the shit they wanted while we sometimes had issues getting food.
That week recently when there were floods in every country except where there were fires in every country. That was wild.
The damn toilet paper crisis
When two friends and me got punched on the street by robbers, i look in all directions now.
I stopped watching the 24/7 need channels. It cut out so much fear and paranoia that those channels thrive on.
The supreme court ending any ballot recount and investigation into corruption in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. Gore won that one by a hair and Bush only took office because Florida threw out ballots to steal the election and the supreme court rubber stamped it. Any and all optimism I had for democracy in the US died that day and it's weird to me that we just sort of shrugged and ignored it.
I was too young to vote but I remember asking my dad if we were going to get into a civil war. "Democrats don't have the guts"
An oil change place completely draining my car out of oil and not putting a single drop in. This eventually caused my car to overheat and the engine ended up blowing up. After this I've come to realize that there are some truly evil people who will try to sabotage your life without even knowing a single thing about you. Pretty much don't blindly trust anybody even authoritative professionals like doctors, mechanics, law enforcement, etc..
When it took two separate doctors to get my partner diagnosed for MS so she could get medication for it as it attacked her eye. I knew I could never trust another one.
The death of my father. Before that i was always busy taking care of someone else. Now i'm much more thinking of what i need and want from life.
Its interesting how much of the comments focus on negativity.
For me it was mediation that solved a lot of my anxiety and changed my view of the world, along with a bit of stoic philosophy. Thats not really an event by itself but it was an event for me to discover mindfulness.
I agree, the responses are fascinating. I wonder if it's because we start out with a sheltered view of the world and once out from the protection of childhood shelter, we are exposed to the brutal truth of the world?
GamerGate destroyed my confidence that the mainstream media tended to get things right and pick the right side. That doesn't mean it is always wrong, but it is not always right either.
Does it have to be an event in our lifetime (and not a historical event we learned about)?
If some historic event changed your life so much, we probably also like to read about it.
the whole kerfluffle about the stupid wizard game. folks like me actively dying while some stupid people with nothing better to do think that it's worth any fighting whatsoever. it's a damn game, who cares.
Huh
They're talking about the Hogwarts game
Seeing Racism brought back to life in 2008…
