For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
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Countless times throughout my life. In fact, a big part of my life is slowly deprogramming from years of propaganda. Whether it is religion or politics the amount of misinformation is enormous as it is prolific.
Even something very personal like relationships is fraught with tons of negative cultural issues around control and love. Most of what society teaches is a lie designed to perpetuate things like the Patriarchy.
Edit: After reading a lot of these I would like to offer an alternative to what a lot of people have said.
I learned about a conspiracy back in the early days of computing that was essentially that the US was intercepting all emails and all phone calls around the world.
There was a lot of good evidence including a spy pact with Canada where we had an installation on their soil and they had an installation on ours so we could spy on our own citizens without breaking the letter of the law.
Also good evidence that AT&T and other providers had let the government access their major server trunks to install their own hardware.
Well Snowden proved it was all real. This was probably the biggest conspiracy theory of my lifetime.
Go all the way back to the echelon conspiracy. You were a crazy person to believe the government could intercept your phone calls at any time. 30 years later it’s an accepted norm.
Used to believe that humanity would inherently self-improve, especially the more easily information became accessible.
People couldn’t read and write at first, and didn’t know much about the world, and now we have instant communication and access to vast repositories of knowledge.
I believed that people were naturally curious, and wanted to learn and figure things out. Education systems sucked, but with improvement it could foster that curiosity in everyone!
Turns out that was incredibly naive. Humans have an inherent ego that tries to make themselves more than reality. Their problems are more real than another’s. Their inconveniences are more important than anything bigger-picture. I thought religion were old dinosaur structures of primitive belief systems that lasted for too long, but humans will literally make shit up or believe in some made up shit from someone else if it helps them ignore the inconveniences of reality.
COVID-19 really helped sink that in.
Oh man. Yeah, I remember in middle school reading about WW1, WW2, Vietnam, the Civil War (USA) and thinking that thank god we’re smart enough to be past that.
Yes, also, COVID killed any hope I had left. I remember before the pandemic thinking that if aliens landed all of humanity’s petty bickering would end once we had something that united us all, and when COVID hit I thought “this is it, we have no choice but to come together as humans and face a challenge”…holy shit was I wrong. In the years since the pandemic I’ve had to actively try to forget most of what happened for my own sanity.
People are naturally curious but we live in a system that punishes curiosity.
Humans are smart.
But this isn’t our natural habitat. Its a laboratory and we are the lab rats.
Can you judge an animal’s intelligence if they are in a controlled environment and manipulated by mad scientists? (mad scientist = the 1%)
covid also shifted the anti-vaxers to the RIGHT.
I ran 5 km every day and ate very low fat, mostly plants. Ended up with non alcoholic fatty liver.
seems inherited, did you ever find a cause?
No one else in my family or extended family has had fatty liver. Fortunately yes, I reversed my NAFLD by eating a low carbohydrate high fat diet.
I believed that I had to be certain way in society or I was fundamentally flawed and bad.
I dropped that belief, acknowledge that to some point it’s convenient for me to follow societal norms but trying to fit in makes me mostly miserable. I naturally don’t want to do things that bother other people but I also don’t really want to be around them so why should I try to be likeable to them any more than is normal to me. This way people who like me, are sure to like me as I am. If I like them enough, I’ll naturally also want to be considerate of them, even if I have to occasionally behave a little different.
I somehow made it very complicated with just beating myself up for being bad/stupid/ugly/broken because I kept believing people who I don’t even like.
Pizza party, soccer practice, Christmas, whenever it’s served really
Kony 2012, not the genreal idea of raising awareness about Joseph Kony, but that it would actually lead to his capture.
I was raised evangelical Christian in the Bible belt. I was a “true believer” I call it now. I literally believed there was a hell that people were going to. I’m glad I’m out of that.
Mine have generally been mentioned. In my early 20s in the early 2000s. Got into the ancient aliens stuff briefly.
Believed in supernatural and past life stuff for a good bit.
By the mid-2000s, having “pulled myself out of poverty” (I didn’t do it on my own; I had help and support for family after having been homeless at one point) and gotten a salaried job, started listening to rightwing radio hosts. Thought I just needed to work a bit harder and success would come. All the other people were lazy and social programs were bad with the possible exception of something like WIC. Nah, I was just fairly lucky to have survived some stupid situations, had help from family, and was generally just way too entitled and thinking I was special. I was fairly insufferable for a good while.
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000
If only everyone else did.
But he was a great tennisman ! Who wouldn’t vote for him ???
Once thought that Google eas a great company and earnt evil.
I gushed over them when Android Open Source Project, Chromium, and the Google summer of code were new. I still think the free and open source projects they maintain are positive things, but I’m disgusted with just about everything else they do.
9/11 truther. Missile pods on military jets and fed reserve gold heist. WTC7 got me in. But I was also a welder and I’d been making thermite for fun since I was a teenager so I knew that jet fuel didn’t have to melt steel beams to significantly reduce its tensile strength, just several hundred degrees was enough to weaken steel. And I know the difference between thermite products and liquid aluminium pouring from the buildings, thermite looks like straight up lava, and in any case, you need way, way more thermite to melt through a steel girder than you might expect from watching movies. It takes at least half a kilo just to melt through the hood of a car, let alone and engine block like the anarchist cookbook would have you believe, I know because I did it.
I remember watching one of the Flash animated “truth” “documentaries” on flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.
It talked about missiles being used and similar stuff, I was 13-14 at the time and I showed my parents, they rightfully explained that this was just a random video that anyone could have made.
They brought up the importance of using trusted sources, but also emphasized that they didn’t have the facts either.
They told me to calm down and wait for verifiable facts to surface.
Yeah the Pentagon impact site never made any sense and the government was never open about the evidence. I was never convinced the official explanation made sense based upon the damage to the building.
The US government could easily clear it up by realizing the footage, but they won’t.
It makes perfect sense to me, what issues do you see with it?
I don’t really care to talk about this unless you have researched this thoroughly because the damage to the building was always inconsistent with the official narrative including the wreckage that was extracted from the building.
This makes me skeptical and the government has never released the footage when they definitely have lots of video evidence that can demonstrate exactly what happened.
Ok, if you are going to play this game…
- Please list your qualifications for doing research on the subject.
- Please let me know what research you have done, understand that I expect more than just facebooking and googling.
This will let me know both were you stand and what level of discussion you expect.
Hard pass. I can already tell what you are up to. Acting like an asshole isn’t the move you think it is.
lol, calling me an asshole when you were the one who started acting all high and mighty, talking about how a normal person wouldn’t understand your special research.
I won’t deny that my last reply was a bit assholish, but that was just a reply to you rudely implying that normal people wasn’t worth debating.
spongebob meme dot gif tventy foor yeers later…
I once watched a 9/11 truther type program that hand waved away this issue by simply stating the government used “nanothermite”. What is “nanothermite”? It’s thermite but acts in whatever way it needs to when somebody pokes holes in the idea of thermite.
Ok, I’ve always wondered what’s up with WTC7, but I could never be bothered to wade through the noise. What was up with that?
It’s still a very strange looking collapse. But the sort of damage caused to it by two giant skyscrapers collapsing next to and into it must have subjected it to stresses is was never designed to take.
And a raging fire inside the building near it’s base that was left to burn mostly unchecked because most of the firefighters were already killed or their equipment destroyed by towers 1 and 2.
Controlled demolitions target the very weakest parts of a structure, causing a cascading failure throughout the structure. In a huge uncontrolled fire and impact, the same weakest points are by definition the most likely to fail first, so the collapse looks similar. Also WTC7 was built above an existing building, so it’s vertical columns didn’t go straight down into bedrock, they went down to near street level, and then transferred the load horizontally around the existing building. From the outside it looked like a regular rectangle, but on the inside, it effectively had a giant unsupported hole on the inside. Under normal conditions, structurally sufficient, but if you shake the ever loving fuck out of it twice and then light it on fire with no firefighters nearby…
Still waiting for any other buildings to collapse like these three buildings did. It will never happen though. Three nearly perfect collapses in the same day in a row was a pretty insane random occurrence.
Just about anything is possible and able to be proved through science. This doesn’t necessarily mean that is what happened though.
It takes at least half a kilo just to melt through the hood of a car
Counter argument: if you did this at home on a hobby budget, imagine what is possible with a high tech lab and a military budget.
imagine
Not a terribly convincing start to a hypothesis.
The start was what they achieved with no resources. Keep up.
You are grossly overestimating military budget spending. Now, a private contractor with a government contract, on the other hand, maybe. As long as they didn’t waste it and delivered on schedule. Wait, that doesn’t happen either.
IF a private contractor can hijack 4 planes in the most heavily guarded airspace in the world without scrambling a single defence fighter, then they can source Nanothermite on schedule.
Not saying that happened, but suitable explosives are not the weakest link in the 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Apple products through the 2010s.
I’d watch their WWDC presentations online religiously
Antitheism and egalitarianism (read anti-feminsm). I was an ubsufferable cunt. Not to excuse my cuntness, I was raised Mormon: condescending hatred of all those not like me was all I knew.
Tends to be the way things go. You see the flaws in something you believed in and go too far to the extreme opposite direction.
would antitheism be a common thing for recent converts to atheism? i was the same way for a few years back when i ditched christianity.
The zeal of a convert.
I dunno, my crisis of faith went from mourning to anger very quickly. I was quick to anger and held grudges like any immature man back then. Perhaps I just needed to work it out of my system. Now I’m more let live and let live, but it was a slow process filled with people with more patience than I deserved.
I still think organized religion is a net drain on society but I’m generally ok with private faith. (I was raised secular though, never had my own faith to lose)
Me too, I just also think that the antitheist movement (mostly vocal and unempathetic antitheists such as I was) is also a net drain on society.
I think people create god in their own image. They use doctrine to justify what they would have believed anyway. I was taught to be homophobic by homophobes, Leviticus was just the tool used to deliver the lesson.
Stopping being Mormon didn’t stop my homophobia, the lessons were deep and that came later. I think instead if I had internalised homophobia=bad earlier, I would have left the church as a by product. Internalising bigotry=bad got me to leave antitheism, is where I got that from.
So that’s where I’m at: champion human rights and people will leave toxic structures as a by product.
That’s a big part of the problem but I think the worst part is that religious upbringings train people to accept irrational explanations for things. Magical thinking, unfounded claims, unquestioning adherence to authority, this is the fertile soil for all manner of nonsense from astrology to vaccine hesitancy to “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
Perhaps. Irrationality in itself isn’t evil though. We’re all irrational about somethings sometimes, that’s just what it is to be human. We just be meat sacks powered by cornflakes, it would be weird if we weren’t irrational.
My biggest problem with religion is the bigotry, religion certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on it though, and antitheism doesn’t make you immune. Antitheism is fertile ground for bigotry and the irrational justifications for it.
Anti-intellectualism, and the harm spread from anti-intellectualism, is awful though, no arguments from me. A lot of evil can arrive from believing one is “rational” while they’re blind to their own limits of perspective.
There was a part in my life that I was in the antitheistic crowd, I was annoying, but as I grew up I switched to a more sane viewpoint.
These days I am mostly atheistic but with a healthy dose of agnosticism thrown in.
What changed you?
Which change? My crisis of faith was because I went before God and got nothing. That’s not really supposed to happen in Mormon Doctrine.
My move away from antitheism was some people, well person actually, with more patience than I deserved. They slowly showed me bigotry, all bigotry, was wrong. By challenging my beliefs gently and letting me reveal my bigotry to myself. I was, thankfully, in the listening mood so I got there in the end.
Antitheism, at the time, had R. Dawkins, as a champion, skeptictube was doing it’s alt-right reveal with “feminist owned” vids every where. So yeah… Bigotry was/is in its bones
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 used to think that thinking had deep intrinsic significance. (That’s what I get for growing up in a thinking-obsessed culture)
