I spent a long time here being ABF's nemesis in matters political and religious. Kinda stopped for awhile as this place has entered vegetative coma.
In the time since, I've come to understand that I was wrong about almost everything. Much of my conservative stance came from my father feeding me a steady stream of Rush Limbaugh growing up, and then Fox News a little later on. I took all that shit at face value and it came to define my views on politics and religion well into my adult life.
Once I was on my own and far away, and I started living life on my own (read: I got to know what being poor was like), it all started to ring hollow to me. I was doing my best to pull myself up by the bootstraps, and to my credit, I never did resort to taking government assistance, but it was only myself and my girlfriend, and a lot of the time, we paid rent and utilities and went hungry. It made me realize that, had we ended up with a kid or two, or had anything gone wrong, such as a layoff or some sort of injury, we would have gone from poverty to disaster.
That had a sobering effect on me, and in the years since, my worldview has transformed almost entirely. I have rejected Christianity, and all religion. I have gone from someone who might have once embraced the Tea Party to a far-left liberal who opposes conservatives (and the Tea Party in particular) in all ways. My support for the Iraq War and President Bush, my opposition to gay marriage and religious freedom, my contempt for the poor, are all things that cause me a lot of regret these days.
To put it more succinctly, ABF was right about almost every topic we argued. So, this is my way of throwing down all the towels and conceding every one of those debates. I voted for President Obama last year and watched his victory with deep pride. You and I are pretty much soul brothers now.
ABF can still be wrong about everything else, though. I mean, let's not go overboard here.
I went through a similar transformation over the past years. It is surprising to think I actually thought creationism was a valid viewpoint.
But, to put things in perspective a bit, I'm still not a democrat. It's funny, before I wasn't a democrat because I was against "leftist" policies. Now I'm not a democrat because they seem too conservative to me. It was very sobering to watch the republican party self destruct so utterly over the last few years. I never really considered myself a republican either, but I've lost pretty much any respect there.
Shortly after abandoning certain zany thoughts, I flirted with "objectivism" for about one month, then promptly abandoned it when I recognized that you CAN'T derive an economic and moral policy from "A is A" no matter how much you try (also, the whole philosophy appears to be "Be a two year old, forever"). I never once would have thought objectivism would be so utterly embraced by those who profess to also be christian.
I too voted for Obama, but I can't say I watched with pride so much as a grim satisfaction that it wasn't the other guy. Obama is ostensibly "for" a lot of the things I'm for now, but sometimes he lacks the conviction to really follow through right to the end (the entire health care "debate" over how legal it is to force someone to buy insurance could easily have been made moot if only the public option had been kept). Guantanamo is still open, and oh yes, flying death robots patrol the skies under the control of someone who's only restriction is deciding to call someone a terrorist with no real oversight.
The really annoying thing about that last one? If the republicans really wanted to vilify Obama as a tyrant destroying our freedoms, THAT is the best argument they could possibly make, one which if they stuck with it, would really rally the party far more effectively. That they don't states loud and clear that keeping that power for themselves should they win back the white house is more important than winning the election in the immediate future, and that is pretty scary. Don't misunderstand. I use hyperbole, but I'm fully aware that Obama is unlikely to do anything that would be too public and too shocking with those drones, such as attacking an American on American soil, or attacking a republican congressman when they are over seas. Indeed, I'd go further and say Obama would never do anything he couldn't justify to himself, as he does seem to have his own moral code for what's "justifiable". But, I will say that I have at least a few questions about why no one bothered to ask why that seal team didn't at least ATTEMPT to take Osama alive. No, I'm not talking about any dumbarse conspiracies, I'm just saying it was a bit much to go for IMMEDIATE assassination of someone who clearly was defenseless at that specific moment, without at least an attempt at capture. Sure, it was frickin' Osama, hard to really have any sympathy for the bastard, I'm just saying that it seems like it would have been good to make the attempt to capture unless any chance of escape or resistance presented itself. But then, that may be me talking out of my arse on that last one. At the very least, the drones seem like a big deal to me, enough to say that Obama was really just a partial step away from madness, but we aren't in the clear yet, by far.
I was not right about everything. Defending the iQue, really, me?
http://tcforums.com/forums/showthread.ph...ster-vol-2
As for politics, I grew up with liberal parents, and it rubbed off... we have some conservative relatives (my moms' brother and his wife); always just almost never talked about politics about them. There was that one time that my aunt was ranting about how evil Hillary was. Arguments on web forums, while nasty, are nowhere near as bad as real ones...
My dad took my change of political viewpoint personally. He's the one who got me to listen to Rush Limbaugh when I was 8 because he thought I would enjoy the funny parody jingles (and he was right). Because, retrospectively, that's the sort of mentality to which Rush best appeals, in terms of both style and substance. He gave me Rush's books as gifts. He whipped me with extension cords when I couldn't correctly identify Goldwater as the GOP 1964 candidate.
Of course, I'm kidding. I had to buy his books with my own money.
;)
Ugh, I can't imagine that. I grew up with NPR and some newspapers (the local one and the Boston Globe, mostly, when I was younger; also later the Portland paper and the New York Times) as my main news sources...
I didn't really grow up with politics that much, it was 9/11 that got me to watching the news everyday and the news channel that I happened to stick with was Fox News.
I still argue politics quite often, and I have to say, it takes an awful lot less effort being a liberal to make a point.
It's also very frustrating, because conservatism today is little more than an unregulated loony bin. It's far worse than it was even a few years ago. Conservatives now just seem like a bunch of hateful, spiteful, petty retards to me. I never felt like I was myself, when I was one, but going back and seeing the things I said, it would be very easy to make the assumption.
No, you're right, the right has gone farther and farther to the right over the past two decades. The '90s were a very partisan time, what with how much the Republicans hated Clinton despite how centrist he was, but things are far worse now. The Republican party has moved far, far right. The Democrats have moved a little bit right as well, unfortunately, but because of how extreme the Republican party is now, the gulf between parties is larger than ever in many issues. The Republicans have just gone completely out of their minds. It'd be nice to have an opposition party actually interested in government again...
I don't think the democrats are just "a little bit" right. I don't recall that Clinton ever condoned drone strikes or silencing critics or going against a legal requirement to give, say, refugee kids a fair hearing. (Though to be fair, at least Obama didn't create "Don't Ask Don't Tell".)
That's what gets me. I've said it before but it bears repeating. Obama is doing most of the things the Republicans WANT to do, but he's still "a tyrant king".
I think the Democrats are being dragged slowly to the left. They've never really been left wing except in comparison to the Republicans.
Honestly, I think the Tea Party is just a terrorist organization too lazy and self-interested to carry out most of its threats, but every once in awhile, you get your incidents like the Cliven Bundy shit and those two Teahadists who murdered cops in Las Vegas in an attempt to start the violent revolt against the government that conservatives have been openly advocating for years.
The Republican party as a whole is dominated by them and their rhetoric, and as a result, we don't really have a two-party system of politics anymore. We have only one party which has any interest at all in the responsibility of making a country function. The other can't decide whether plutocrats or theocrats should run the show. All they can seem to agree on is how much they hate minorities and the poor.
Yes but do you admit to being wrong about N64?
Nope. People who liked that shit console and its kiddy Mario clone games are most certainly still pussies and/or faggots as well as possibly retards.