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.

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.

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

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.

For the record Jonestown didn’t use real Kool Aid

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.

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.

I believed I was a man.

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

Kony 2012, not the genreal idea of raising awareness about Joseph Kony, but that it would actually lead to his capture.

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.

Not a hard experiencer of the highly strange, but I'm becoming less and less of a skeptic.

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!