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Has anyone ever had their mind changed on a political/religious/controversial issue?

L

Liu Kang Baking A Pie

Member
shnurgleton said:
Yeah. I used to be a republican. Then I grew up and learned that tax cuts are far from the most important thing in politics.
Click to expand...
hahaha, same.

Most political views I believed in until about age 25 were just me repeating the same shit people around me repeated without critical thinking.

"The unexamined life is not worth living." -Socrates

Read books, y'all.
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
I’m 46 so tons. Race, gender, politics, lgbt, science. If you’re not continually accepting new information and evolving then you’re a nimrod.
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
Off the top of my head:

Death penalty - used to support in some cases, now oppose in all
Declawing pets - I didn't realize what that did to them
Balancing the US budget - used to think they needed to act like a household, now realize how dumb that is

All changed via GAF discussions.
 
A

Air

Banned
I've always been fairly centrist/ left center, but my core beliefs: equal rights/feminism/gay marriage haven't really changed. What has changed is my expression of them. I guess the death penalty is a good one. I don't think it's as good a deterrent as many would like to believe. In some cases it might be worthwhile, but it's definitely not been used in a judicious manner.

Religiously, I still believe in God. While I never really saw God as a literal person, my understanding of what God is has firmly been entrenched in panentheism/panpsychism/ ground of being for around half a decade now. It makes the most sense to me and has had a huge shift on my way of thinking. I'm grateful I was able to fall into that understanding as it's kept me especially grounded when many people may not be
 
S

Saganator

Member
I was raised as Christian Republican and now I'm an atheist bleeding heart liberal. Pretty much all my political beliefs have changed. Thank you Carl Sagan and SomethingAwful forums.
 
U

Uncle_Classy

Member
Was a Catholic for 20 years. Considered myself to be pretty devout for a while even. I had the standard "good Catholic" beliefs: "pro-life," against gay marriage, etc. I had twelve years of Catholic school to reinforce it all too.

I've been an atheist for around 5 years now. The internet had a huge part to play in making me the way I am now. Hearing cogent, empirically evidenced arguments on the internet dismantling the dogma I had believed eventually led me to a tipping point where I had to reevaluate all my beliefs.

Now I find myself to be left of most people I encounter in day to day life.
 
C

Cocaloch

Member
The point of an argument isn't necessarily to put out a set of rationally connected ideas to make someone agree with your point, pace the enlightenment.

Very few people will change their minds about something they actually put stock in based on a single argument. However seeing and understanding arguments as having a certain amount of socially defined legitimacy is certainly quite impact.

Which is all to say you don't just make arguments on topics like those you mentioned to directly change someone's mind, but instead as part of a cultural process in which certain ideas and modes of thinking aquire or loss legitimacy.

I make a ton of arguments on this site that are often seen as bizarre and radical, but I'm rarely actually trying to change the person I'm arguing with in particular.

Liu Kang Baking A Pie said:
Read books, y'all.
Click to expand...

Don't just read books, critically engage with the world around you. I'd rather someone do nothing at all than passively read Ayn Rand.
 
E

ElectricBlanketFire

Member
I would not have voted for Obama before this board.

You guys made me do a complete 180 on numerous social and political issues and I feel embarrassed it took me until my mid-20s to get there.
 
M

MikeyB

Member
LordKasual said:
No.

Energy, research, anger, vitriol, and fact-checking will never change someone's mind when it's already made up.

people need to experience things to change, words are worthless like 85% of the time.


that's why so many of these GAF "issue" threads are wastes of time. Just a bunch of people coughing up their opinions and views, praying someone disagrees with them so that they can expose how wrong they are.

The only results are either assimilation or further detachment, at least from what i've observed.
Click to expand...

I love this response because it ignores the posts above it and makes a sweeping statement that is proved false by the posts above it.

So meta.

But yes, the debates on this site changed my mind about several things, like checking privilege and whether Nintendo was worth another shot.
 
G

Glass Shark

Banned
I used to be an ultra-capitalist libertarian idiot. Now I’m just about as far left as you can get in almost every way. My mind wasn’t changed by any one particular thing, it was slow over time by observing and being sympathetic to the plights of others.
 
C

Cocaloch

Member
MikeyB said:
I love this response because it ignores the posts above it and makes a sweeping statement that is proved false by the posts above it.

So meta.

But yes, the debates on this site changed my mind about several things, like checking privilege and whether Nintendo was worth another shot.
Click to expand...

I think he's wrong, but I don't think posts in this thread prove him false per se. People are generally really really poor at identifying why the believe what they believe. Posters in this thread have certainly changed their opinion, but to what extent that could be chalked up to some ideal type rational debate is certainly a meaningful question.

Ultimately it's probably a question of degrees. People change their opinion based on rational arguments rather rarely, though it obviously does happen sometimes.
 
C

Captain Pants

Killed by a goddamned Dredgeling
Abortion/women's rights...

My mother had four miscarriages. Two before my older brother was born, one after he was born, and one after I was born. Between this, and being staunchly Catholic, she became somewhat radicalized on abortion issues. She simply can't see it in terms outside of it being a baby, and seeing all of these women out there 'killing their babies', and the hurt it causes her when she thinks of the kids she wanted to have, and lost.

That's the environment I grew up in. I marched with Pro-Lifers. I held signs with pictures of aborted fetuses. I wrote essays in the early years of high school all about the evils of abortion. Around that time, I stopped believing that there is a god... and once that came around, I started analyzing every aspect of the way I was raised. The dogmatic structure in my head was a house of cards if there was no god there at the center to hold it all together.*

The more I looked at Catholicism, the more I had a really strong opposition to their stance on abortion. You can't be against abortion if you also want to keep people from having access to birth control. Sex is a natural and healthy thing, and telling people to avoid any methods that would stave off a pregnancy, just rubbed me the wrong way... at this point I hadn't even considered pregnancies resulting from rape and incest, or situations in which the baby wouldn't be viable, and was likely to kill the mother. Being surrounded by these people who when asked, would say 'NO' across the board to any of these hypotheticals, I realized abortion needed to be safe legal and rare, and that birth control needs to be easily accessible.

*-I'm not saying that if I suddenly believed in God, that I'd go back to being Pro-Life. It was just the catalyst for me examining things.
 
M

mambadragon

Banned
My views on drug use crimes has changed dramatically where I'm almost to the point that legalizing drugs is the best way to handle (and start to fix) many of the problems. Then there's of course the racial element to it.
 
L

LegendofLex

Member
There have been a few times that this has happened about sub-issues, like BLM orgs holding meetings where no whites are allowed. I get and support BLM, but I let my privilege and idealism get in the way of seeing why this is a thing.

And, frankly, I used to be a pretty staunch conservative on lots of issues when I was younger (anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-gay, pretty much all the vices of insular conservative Catholics) and I've turned basically completely around on all of that stuff. I can't cite any specific cases of this, but I'm sure I was also blind to my own privilege and oblivious to others' lack of privilege for a long time. But most of that wasn't a product of people winning me over with debates. It was a matter of experiencing people on the other sides of these issues.

Sure, the arguments I'd hear online definitely got assimilated into my own thinking once I realized why and how I was wrong. But it generally wasn't those arguments that flipped me.

In some cases, my thinking on issues is a bit different than the norm even for policies I personally align with. One example is abortion, where I'm unconvinced by the idea that there's no moral problem with terminating a pregnancy, but also definitely convinced that anti-abortion policies inflict real and targeted harm to women that women should not be compelled to tolerate (and, of course, they exacerbate the underlying problems that lead to abortions). To put it another way, I'd support efforts to reduce abortions if those efforts aren't evil and don't take away remedial options/agency from women, but in the absence of real solutions for that no one should be turning to criminalizing abortion. Maybe that isn't really that different from "safe, legal, and rare," I guess.
 
legacyzero

legacyzero

Banned
Religion- im an Atheist/Humanist now. Only recently came to terms with my non-belief. Was very very hard and scary to accept. One of the hardest times of my life.

Pro-life- Im pro-life, but also pro-abortion. I believe we should try to prevent/minimize abortions by providing education, Women's health, free and easily available birth control for both Men AND Women. The republican way of things is to just try and ignore that Rowe V Wade happened, stop caring for women, attacking and closing abortion clinics etc etc.

Marriage Equality/ Gay rights- Originally, I was simply indifferent. I knew nothing about it, nor did I care. But I was also born and raised in the south. There's a clear difference in commentary and belief there, that by somehow giving rights to "the gays" is terrible. Now I'm 100% for it. Discrimination at any level just shouldn't be allowed. Period. Being on GAF also helped with this shift. It also didn't help that originally, I literally knew or knew of nobody personally that was gay back then. So to have no commentary other than from angry conservatives just left me with apathy.

Death Penalty- I was absolutely for it. "Kill that mother fucker!" I'd say. Then it dawn on me that we have just as little right to kill them, as we claim they have under law. Zero. Also finding out the shocking number of people killed when they're innocent? Even one is too many. So if anything, I only support it when something large and extra horrible is done. Timothy McVeigh for instance.

To name a few
 
L

Liu Kang Baking A Pie

Member
For me, the third step after going from anti-abortion to pro-abortion is realizing the entire issue has nothing to do with most of us and is just a distraction to get us to argue about petty left vs right American politics instead of substantive global issues.
 
M

mike6467

Member
shnurgleton said:
Yeah. I used to be a republican. Then I grew up and learned that tax cuts are far from the most important thing in politics.
Click to expand...

I was in this state for a few years, my parents were Republicans.

Though I remember it being pretty validated by a political history book I read in high school.

I wish I still had it. The book claimed that highly educated people voted R and less educated people voted D, and it made a straight implication that the poor people just didn't know what was good for them. This was a public high school too. At the time I was in an environment where of course that logic made sense. It wasn't until I got out of high school, started work and started contrasting the experiences of myself and those around me that I noped out hard.
 
L

Lyon N. Laap

Member
Death penalty, in most cases. Not sure how I'd feel about a modern day Hitler, but life in prison doesnt seem like too little a punishment.

I used to consider it a necessary evil that a responsible government would only reluctantly use in bulletproof cases. Then I grew up, did my own research, and realized how pointless and abusive capital punishment really is.
 
N

NullPointer

Member
It can be hard to tell if there have been changed minds because of forum threads.

I know sometimes if I make an argument and somebody provides a thoughtful counter I may just leave it at that, and consider the point over time.

So, at least from some personal experience, leaving a thread isn't always escaping. Sometimes its just a good spot to leave the conversation and ponder what was said.
 
V

Van

Member
Grew up in very republican family in small town Texas, always had them telling me racist shit but when I got into highschool and hs band, seeing different perspectives and then moving to Florida and then New Orleans, I've changed my whole outlook on things, now I identify as a democrat and half my family hates me lmao
 
F

Fenderputty

Banned
ElectricBlanketFire said:
I would not have voted for Obama before this board.

You guys made me do a complete 180 on numerous social and political issues and I feel embarrassed it took me until my mid-20s to get there.
Click to expand...

You got there .... that's all that matters in the end. +

NullPointer said:
It can be hard to tell if there have been changed minds because of forum threads.

I know sometimes if I make an argument and somebody provides a thoughtful counter I may just leave it at that, and consider the point over time.

So, at least from some personal experience, leaving a thread isn't always escaping. Sometimes its just a good spot to leave the conversation and ponder what was said.
Click to expand...


It's likely not one argument or thread that does it. It's a culmination of various arguments and threads over time that shape how we feel.
 
B

Brian Griffin

Member
I used to think limits on abortion, like no late term ones, were ok to have. Now I realize that access to late term abortion is crucial for saving the mother's life in the event of terrible complications in the later months. Forcing a women to continue to carry and eventually birth her dead or soon to die baby amounts to fucking torture that only the heartless would support.
 
M

MikeyB

Member
Cocaloch said:
I think he's wrong, but I don't think posts in his thread prove him false per se. People are generally really really poor at identifying why the believe what they believe. People in this thread have certainly changed their opinion, to what extent that could be chalked up to some ideal type rational debate is certainly a meaningful question.

Ultimately it's probably a question of degrees. People change their opinion based on rational arguments rather rarely, though it obvious does happen sometimes.
Click to expand...

I see your point, agree, and now think that the dorums assist in changing minds but don't do it on their own.
 
L

Liu Kang Baking A Pie

Member
MikeyB said:
I see your point, agree, and now think that the forums assist in changing minds but don't do it on their own.
Click to expand...
Pretty much. New information can plant a seed that grows as the person continues to ruminate on and research new ideas instead of assuming they already have the right answers.
 
L

Lil'DigiOp

Member
Gender fluidity used to fuck me up because I thought it was some liberal extreme idea and I treated gender as sex...

But as I met more people and had discussions I learned that it doesn't affect me at all so who really cares? Why should I care?

Let people live.
 
C

Cagey

Banned
Reviewing death penalty statistics and jurisprudence in law school has made me incredibly hesitant to support the penalty because of the observable racial bias against black males in practice.

Not a clean change on the issue in theory, just the practice as it exists in the real world in the modern US.

Also have just become more Hobbesian with regards to my dim view of The People as I've aged.
 
Master Of Illusion

Master Of Illusion

Member
Though I do believe I've become more center-left in the last couple years, at the same time I've become more apathetic towards social issues and treat breaking news like an entertaining reality show.

Maybe it's because I've become more nihilistic in my philosophy as of late, maybe its the Lexapro, idk; but I do like it. Less I have to worry about by just letting go.
 
legacyzero

legacyzero

Banned
LordKasual said:
No.

Energy, research, anger, vitriol, and fact-checking will never change someone's mind when it's already made up.

people need to experience things to change, words are worthless like 85% of the time.


that's why so many of these GAF "issue" threads are wastes of time. Just a bunch of people coughing up their opinions and views, praying someone disagrees with them so that they can expose how wrong they are.

The only results are either assimilation or further detachment, at least from what i've observed.
Click to expand...
I think this highlights the symptom, but not the cure. No mind is truly made up, and sure, experiences are always more effective than perspective.

Though I would agree with he poster you quoted. It's way too often that folks crank up the heat on somebody when they express a view that they don't agree with. I usually try to dig through "issues" threads here and on Twitter to find meaningful discussion and perspective to either help strengthen my view, enhance them, or consider shifting them.

Commonly, I see myself or other posters who express even just a nuanced view, get snarked, condescended, or demonized with a "O RLY, tell us more about how shit a person you are!" THAT is the kind of discussion that does nothing IMO. And I'm still shocked how much it happens, on really any social site. GAF, Twitter, Facebook (which is fucking cancer.)

A couple of months ago, I asked a question about the "Wage/Earnings Gap" (because I know barely anything about it), and before you know it, I'm somebody's honorary 'Milkshake Duck'. Very strange lol.
 
C

Cocaloch

Member
Neece said:
I see what you did there.
Click to expand...

I didn't think he was really joking, because I doubt most of the people in this thread have any sort of strong convictions about how people come to believe what they believe.

Obviously people change their minds based on arguments that appear rational all the time when the stakes are low. But the thread is about the times where it isn't.
 
T

thepotatoman

Unconfirmed Member
I went from libertarian to liberal. As a libertarian I got pretty good at using "correlation does not equal causation" to dismiss everything I disliked, and using very simple economic theories instead for proof about everything.

The healthcare debate most opened my eyes to how bad the free market is, because I could not think of or find a non-cruel theory that could make sense, while most other libertarians seemed fine with being extra cruel about the situation.

My views on race changed a lot too. I remember always being very uncomfortable about the bell curve being used by the right to explain black poverty statistics, but I thought the non-racist libertarian answer was that black culture was the problem. I thought if black people stopped using race as an excuse and pulled up their pants, then the economic gap would go away, and with it the gap in jail numbers. As I switched from libertarian to liberal, I started believing class not race, and class immobility causes black poverty. I thought even though racism died thanks to MLK, there's just not enough opportunities to undo the poverty caused by racism.

I think katrina did a lot to open me up to the idea that maybe racism actually does still exist beyond the rare KKK and neo-nazi. Especially that pic showing black people "loot" and white people "find". I was in a bit of a limbo on what I thought about race for a while after that.

The whole Trayvon Martin thing is probably what pushed me to completely believing that racism is a rampant problem facing the country. So many people were so incredibly quick to be absolutely certain that Trayvon was violent, and there was absolutely no intellectual reason I could see for it but racism. At the time I probably would have been sympathetic to an argument that protesters were overreacting and we can't know what really happened. But everything about what people were actually saying about it is just so blatant racism I don't know how anyone could be blind to it.
 
L

Liu Kang Baking A Pie

Member
thepotatoman said:
I went from libertarian to liberal. As a libertarian I was open I got pretty good at using "correlation does not equal causation" to dismiss everything I disliked, and using very simple economic theories instead for proof about everything.
Click to expand...
The original and still enduring "fake news!" (I did that shit all the time too.)
 
X

Xe4

Banned
Sure. Most people do. There have been studies done that show that people's views and outlooks change drastically over a time period even as short as 10-20 years, even when those same people said they did not think their opinions change much.

Personally I consider it a challenge to continue growing and improving as a person and the views that I hold. I make it a point to try to hold views that are dickish to as few people as possible, are in line with scientific and historical evidence, and that make me a better person more able to help others in my community. More often than not I fail, but I will continue examining my views and actions and try to better myself.

In particular over the last decade or so I've changed my opinions significantly on:
-LGBT rights and my actions towards them.
-Affirmative action.
-The relationship between policing and our communities, particularly minority communities.
-Nuclear power.
-GMO's.
-The politicization of science and the role of science in society.
-Feminism.
-etc. etc.

I don't think I've made my opinions perfect, nor do I think I ever will. However, I have to continue to strive to be a better, more open person, and I rue the day where that is no longer a goal.
 
T

TheOctodad

Member
Changes for me:

- Creationist -> Science Lover

- Used to use racial and homophobic slurs -> am embarrassed and appalled that I would ever do that, actively work to support the rights of minorities.

- Voted GOP for 2 elections -> wouldn't ever do that now

- Believed that the Civil War was about state's rights - > Convinced it was about slavery

- Supported the Iraq war - I'm almost a totally committed to non-violence now.


I mean I basically did a 180.
 
C

Chojin

Member
I used to be anti-choice when I was a teenager. By the time I was 26 I realized I still hate abortions but I think women should have the right to choose because it's not my body. So I fucked off :)

Also making it illegal wouldn't reduce abortions, it would just endanger both lives. Education and condoms and birth control reduces abortions.

I'm the worst Catholic.
 
S

shnurgleton

Member
mike6467 said:
I was in this state for a few years, my parents were Republicans.

Though I remember it being pretty validated by a political history book I read in high school.

I wish I still had it. The book claimed that highly educated people voted R and less educated people voted D, and it made a straight implication that the poor people just didn't know what was good for them. This was a public high school too. At the time I was in an environment where of course that logic made sense. It wasn't until I got out of high school, started work and started contrasting the experiences of myself and those around me that I noped out hard.
Click to expand...

Funny how our education can enable us to rationalize almost anything. I used my Economics major as a crutch for a while early in college, defending supply side economics with "Trust me...I'm an Econ major."

Much closer to an old school Keynesian this days.
 
Q

Queen Vulpix

Member
I was raised by a very religious/conservative family and was pretty much fed all the related things. Throughout the entire Obama presidency except for has last few years I was made to believe he was the literal Antichrist and Fox News was the only right news. For all my teenage years and early 20's that's all I knew and believed was right. After I moved out a few years ago and now no longer being told how I should think I finally began to see just how much I was brainwashed and it took up until spring last year to fully educate myself/erase the beliefs I was told to have for so long.

It's truly scary thinking back on it, plus me being Bisexual and hiding it from my family only added to my depression as a teenager and caused me to only hate myself because I was forced to believe people like me are brainwashed by Satan and Global Warming is God's wrath for "all these gays". Was terrified of having sex or other sexual acts because my family was completely against any abortion of any kind, against protection and got forbid I got birth control.
 
Z

Zepp Twofist

Member
I dunno. I feel like I change my views on things all the time. Biggest thing over the past decade or so is that I used to believe in a lot of the free market libertarian bullshit, while now I believe that the most important thing a government should do is to regulate corporations.
 
G

g11

Member
Hmm, I'm sure I've had my mind changed I just can't think of an example right now. Luckily for me my parents never forced their beliefs on me and very much encouraged me to make up my own mind so I never had much in the way of cemented opinions before critically thinking about them myself.

The only thing that comes to mind recently is having my opinion swayed (slightly) on abortion. I've always been of the opinion that any and all abortion was fine with me. I saw it as a matter of choice for women, a matter of hypocrisy on the part of people who would make abortion illegal, and honestly as the best option for society in the case of unwanted pregnancies where the child might grow up abused in a group home or something like that. Rather cold, I'll admit.

I had a very frank discussion with a friend who was absolutely anti-abortion and between that and watching the Tony Kaye documentary Lake of Fire, I have softened my stance somewhat. I still believe in the right to choose and absolutely in cases of rape, incest, or statutory rape. In other situations, I still think it should absolutely be an option, but ideally I think it'd be better if both parents could agree and the potential father had a say if he was willing to raise the child alone after birth and was a fit parent. Obviously there are issues with this as it could be construed as forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, but as long as the mother is not at extraordinary risk to her health carrying the pregnancy to term and as I said previously, the child is not a product of rape, incest or statutory rape, I think it's not unreasonable versus the alternative. Also seeing statements like Lena Dunham's on the subject ("I never had an abortion, but I wish I did") really make me sick, even if in context it's not quite as heartless as it sounds and I still believe in the right to choose.
 
T

thepotatoman

Unconfirmed Member
Could people go into more detail about what they first thought about LGBT, and how they changed their views? That's one thing I was consistent on. The main thing is I needed more information on trans-issues to go from uncomfortable but thinking people can do what they want to being totally cool with it.
 
R

rjinaz

Member
thepotatoman said:
Could people go into more detail about what they first thought about gay marriage and gayness in general, and how they changed their views? I was always pro-gay, though I knew to keep quiet about it.
Click to expand...

I used to think it was gross. I mean that's basically as much thought as I was willing to give it. I didn't hate gay people, I never did, but I disagreed with it. But that was back when I was like a teen. Then as a young adult I held the view that gay people should not get married because it would be a slippery slope towards other types of marriage. Then around the time I turned 25 or so I was much more active online and started to be in groups which contained gay people. Before long my bigoted views melted away. I didn't care anymore. Right around the time I was 28 or so I was pro gay marriage, knew being gay wasn't a choice. I'm 34 now.

It's probably not a coincidence that the further away I got from religion the less anti-gay I became. Early 20s extreme religion like waiting for the rapture. By the time I was 30 I was disillusioned from religion due to the bigoted views I kept hearing from Christians.
 
L

LookAtMeGo

Member
Religion, homosexuality, I went through a conspiracy stage where I believed everything I read on the internet, was into gang type shit, had no respect for my elders, treated women like shit.. the list goes on.

Growing up in the neighbourhood I did and with the friends I had growing up I've always been good with race related stuff. Was exposed to a lot of different cultures being like the only white kid in my neighbourhood which was very multicultural.

Outside of that you could say I was basically a piece of shit until I hit my 20's.

Just being exposed to people with different views and having an open mind about things is what changed me. I ran away from home at 15 and never looked back so it took me a while to change my views on some things but I came around.
 
P

plagiarize

Banned
Yup. Most recently is was getting my mind changed on the ban on firearms for people with mental health issues. I was pro ban, until I read that ACLU's challenge to it, and then I become completely for the ban being stopped. I could write a list, but that was only a few months ago.
 
kamineko

kamineko

Does his best thinking in the flying car
Oh yeah, definitely. I've always tried to be a "good liberal" whatever that is (hint: it meant something different 20 years ago) and grow as I learn more about people and the world.

When I lost my mind in 2012 (several bouts of mania with psychotic features) and had to face the aftermath of that (which was just amazing, most of our lives are so tenuous but we can't or won't see it), I moved away from this incremental growth and I guess had more "revelatory" change in my life.

I went from atheism to getting confirmed in the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church, which is progressive on matters of race and sexuality, led me to realize that I was often guilty of benign condescension. I wasn't actually loving my fellow humans. I was just tolerating them.

One thing that factored heavily in these upheavals was the realization that, considering all the crazy shit I did, only a white man could get through it without being shot, incarcerated, or institutionalized. The realization that, yes, I am resilient and a fast talker, but that alone would not have protected me.

It's a weird realization, seeing yourself as saved by white supremacy. Sure, you're glad to be alive, but everybody deserves the same chance. This is an ongoing conversation I had with myself, watching the Missouri riots a few years back.

I try to listen to people whose experiences are not like mine. Instead of trying to theorize about what they should do, I listen to what they are saying.

I get more involved now than I used to. I would have like to have been this way all along, but I couldn't find the missing piece. As far as listening to people goes, GAF is a great place for that. I lurk community threads and try to take shit seriously, you know?
 
A

aliengmr

Member
I think the big ones are:

Prison and the justice system. I simply can't stand the idea of indefinite punishment and I prefer rehabilitation to whatever we have now.

Gay marriage was also something that I kind of flipped on pretty dramatically. I wasn't against it, but I had never really considered it fully. The prop 8 thing hit me pretty hard, the idea that a group of people weren't just denied a certain right, but had that right taken away by other citizens. It put a lot of things in perspective, even beyond gay marriage.
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
Saganator said:
I was raised as Christian Republican and now I'm an atheist bleeding heart liberal. Pretty much all my political beliefs have changed. Thank you Carl Sagan and SomethingAwful forums.
Click to expand...

This is pretty much me. Whole family is conservative Christian. Carl Sagan basically changed my life as a young adult, and I know I'm not the only one. Wonder if he had any idea of the legacy he was creating before he passed. Anyways, it's a pretty wild experience to change from a closed off religious world view into that of a non-believer, all while adjusting your political stances as well. It's crazy how that shit goes hand in hand huh?
 
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Dragon's Dogma 2 only had 1/4 of the people credited for working on the game compared to the last few titles by Capcom
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KyoZz replied
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