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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I ran 5 km every day and ate very low fat, mostly plants. Ended up with non alcoholic fatty liver.

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.

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.

Ancient Aliens.

It was about 2002. I was 20.

Yes the internet existed back then but it just wasn't so pervasive. As in I didn't own a computer and that wasn't uncommon.

I bought a second hand book called Ancient Astronauts (?) by a guy called Erik Von Daniken. He's absolutely the 80s / 90s version of Graham Hancock. All the same pseudoscience strategies to popularise a bullshit theory.

I think I could best be described as a troubled young man. I drank heavily, smoked weed every day, party drugs on the weekend. When I was 18 I had left my home and a deeply religious background. I guess I was looking for some kind of secret arcane understanding of the world that wasn't religion.

I honestly don't know what I would have said if someone had have asked me directly - do you really believe that extra terrestrial beings have visited the earth in it's distant history. Like I don't know if I really truly believed it. I sure loved thinking about it though.

I changed my position over a decade or so. I went to uni, got a degree, started my career in accounting. Completely un-related to science or history or anthropology but, I certainly realised that people who have spent a lifetime studying to become experts in their field really know what they're talking about. Like it's just stupid to suggest that "every real archaologist in the world is stupid and only I can explain earth's real history".

I still am a weird guy but I don't believe in weird stuff like that anymore.

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

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.

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!

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000

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.

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.

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.

For the record Jonestown didn’t use real Kool Aid

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.

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.

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

The US state apparatus probably knew about 9/11. I can't probably prove this and I don't feel like debating it but I feel this strongly. They knew it was gonna happen and let it because they understood how much they could benefit from it. Anyway I didn't drink enough koolaid to think they orchestrated it.