And I don’t mean things you previously had no strong opinion about.
What is a belief you used to hold that you no longer do, and what/who made you change your mind about it?
For me one of the most recent things I’ve changed my mind about was my stance on (Finland) joining NATO. I used to oppose the idea because I was uninformed and thought that if a member state somewhere far away gets attacked that means I’m almost guranteed to be sent there fighting. I also didn’t think an actual hot conflict was a realistic threat in the civilized western world or atleast that the possibility of something like that was extremely small. Suffice to say I was proven wrong.
haha exact opposite for me
Why don’t you share your experience then and elaborate on what made you go from being for NATO to being against it?
I assume you saw it, but others might not. I replied to a similar question here:
Elon Musk.
Sure, I thought, the guy’s probably an ass hole considering the amount of exwives he has. A rich cunt billionaire. But Steve Jobs wasn’t a nice guy either, but without his… Uh… “special” nature certain aspects of computers would’ve been decades behind.
But then I started listening to engineers, ones who could see through the hype that Elon Musk seems to create for everything he does, because they understood the numbers behind everything he claims and promises.
And I realised, Elon is full of shit. He’s not doing anything that manufacturers didn’t already know how to do, and he’s selling it like he invented it.
This realisation came well before he bought twitter. When he did buy Twitter and started using it as his own… Plaything, I realised he’s actually an immature idiot.
Back in 2015 I was in high school and we had to do a senior project which was a 15 page paper and then a 10 minute presentation too graduate. I did mine on Elon Musk and was fully onboard the Musk train for a while after that. I remember being kinda bummed realizing that this dude who I had thought was gonna revolutionize the wolrd was just a snake oil salesman. I still have a video of me practicing for my presentation which I just stumbled upon on an old harddrive a few months ago.
I think he made a lot of aerospace engineering students depressed.
The ussr and china were evil and nato were the good guys fighting for freedom.
Boy was I wrong on that one. What changed my mind were the tankies on hexbear who consistently were the most knowledgable on a topic and kept being correct with (what I thought at the time) the most obviously incorrect takes.
I bet you don’t talk to many Finnish people… Or east Europeans.
By the way; Tiananmen Square says hi.
I bet you dont read many history books.
Reading is my speciality.
Alright, lets start you off with readsettlers.org then
Keep the recommendations coming; I’ll know exactly what to avoid reading.
Academic history is the only thing that matters, besides asking the people who actually live there.
What academic history have you read?
A good deal of Oxford published materials. For you I’d recommend starting with a junior history encyclopedia. :)
I’d be curious to hear your justification for the attack on Ukraine then or the treatment of Uighurs in China.
Ukraine… Russia isn’t socialist anymore you know? Gorbachev ended that back in 1991 with the help of his western allies, against the wishes of the population, over 90% of which voted for the USSR to remain.
Still, this current war started in 2014 with the CIA-backed fascist coup and the subsequent killing of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, like in Donbas and Crimea, for resisting the coup gov.
This was the results of the 2010 elections for example.
Eastern Ukrainians don’t support the current gov, and even welcomed the Russian army as liberators in 2022.
And as for China, the US and its allies are the only ones accusing them of mishandling the ETIM in Xinjiang. Muslim countries and the Global South approve of China’s policies.
35+ mostly muslim UN states have approved of how China handled this after sending delegates and diplomats to Xinjiang:
…separatism and religious extremism has caused enormous damage to people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, which has seriously infringed upon human rights, including right to life, health and development. Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers. Now safety and security has returned to Xinjiang and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there are safeguarded. The past three consecutive years has seen not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang and people there enjoy a stronger sense of happiness, fulfillment and security. We note with appreciation that human rights are respected and protected in China in the process of counter-terrorism and deradicalization.
We appreciate China’s commitment to openness and transparency. China has invited a number of diplomats, international organizations officials and journalist to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counter-terrorism and deradicalization there. What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the media. We call on relevant countries to refrain from employing unfounded charges against China based on unconfirmed information before they visit Xinjiang.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation approve of China’s treatment of its Muslim population.
- Welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat’s delegation upon invitation from the People’s Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.
Unlike other countries, China has mostly responded to ETIM’s attacks by building vocational training centers and integrating the region better into the rest of China’s economy, that is to say they are tackling the material reasons for why someone would have to resort to violence in the first place. And it has been successful, hence the Global South countries approving of it.
You can visit Xinjiang and see it for yourself btw since covid restrictions are gone now, and there’s alot of yt videos doing just that.
First of all - you’re not the person my question was directed at.
Secondly - you’re just firehosing me with information that I couldn’t fact-check in any reasonable amount of time nor figure out all the things you’re omiting. You also state as fact things that you or nobody else could possibly know to the degree of cerainty you present it as such as “this current war started in 2014 with the CIA-backed fascist coup”
However, even if I grant you that everything you stated above is factually correct it still leaves unanswered what the main point of my question was; how do you justify this? Take the Russian invasion of Ukraine for example. If west is evil and east is good then how does a murderous campaing like this fit into the equation? How is it moral to invade a sovereign nation, attack their civilian population, target critical infrastucture in the middle of winter, send your own people there to die in meatwave attacks after two days of training and bomb cities into rubble. Cities where their alledged supporters are living in? Not even China is endorsing this and the whole “evil” west has united in support of the underdog being bullied by the second most powerful nation in the world. I can’t possibly imagine how someone can look at this carnage and think Russia is good.
I’m not really justifying the invasion. Its aims of suppressing the far-right in western Ukraine seems to have kinda backfired from this after all, with the Ukraine gov using this as an excuse to suppress the left.
Point is, what else could’ve they done? They’ve already tried to join NATO multiple times from even before the USSR’s dissolution and have been denied (since it exists to suppress socialism, and particularly Russia, just look up what their first secretary Ismay has said about NATO’s purpose, globally, not give them a say) and they already had the Minsk agreements which the US sidelined through the coup. Not doing something about it would lead to the continued killing of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, and NATO getting even closer to Russia since the post-2014 US puppet gov doesn’t abide by the Minsk agreements.
you’re not the person my question was directed at
This post is open to everyone you know? OP can still respond to you if they feel like it. Wouldn’t blame them for not doing so though cuz it can get pretty tiring to continuously debunk western propaganda with how prevalent it is in english-speaking spaces.
That comes after very in-depth reading. What got me that far to even trust their judgement that this kind of research would be worth my time was the fact that they were consistently right about takes on the USSR that seemed ludicrous. Just that they seemed to really know their stuff about USSR history especially the Stalin era. So I started reading
Michael Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds
a rather short book about anticommunism in the west. I already had very left views but what stuck with me was that I required a revolution to be “perfect”, the outcome sure and everyone had to be happy, an unrealistic standard considering the kind of fundamental change I envisioned. Or in Parenti’s words:
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
Once I had conceded my previous “anti-tankie” views and thought of the USSR not as a failed revolution that started of well-intentioned but was led astray by power hungry dictators, but as a successful revolution that had to endure a constant onslaught, physical as well as political, I was “through the looking glass” so to speak.
Then the genocide in Gaza happened and I kind of looked at the countries we were allied with, who were consistently some of the worst offenders of human rights. The whole supporting violent dictatorships in former colonies wasn’t news to me, but when put into perspective I had a “Damn we really are the baddies aren’t we” moment.
I realise that this doesn’t answer your question on Ukraine and the Uighurs but that’s because I don’t have the time right now to get into a debate on that, and the original question was on what changed my mind about it which was less the actual research I then put into, but the heavy-lifting on even questioning the western narrative was done before that.
To answer your question in a nutshell however: The reason the situation in Ukraine deteriorated this far, to the point that the ethnic russians in Ukraine had to even put up “self-defense” forces was meddling of western capitalist forces. The article that I keep referencing on that is ( CW for pictures of dead bodies and gruesome descriptions of fascist violence):
The open fascism in the paramilitary groups that later got put under the umbrella of the Ukrainian army was an open question mark for me, this article gives a very detailed answer to that. The details in that report post 2014 are corroborated in the UN reports as well:
As for the so-called “genocide” of Uighurs in China, the “evidence” is very very circumstantial especially considering the scale alleged. Millions of people are alleged to be held in internment at some point, a scale that should be visible from space. I mean manhattan has a population of 1.7 million, where are all these people interned?? As an example of one of the oddities about the whole allegations. The only countries that seem to care are outspoken anti-communist countries, with the whole muslim world not considering the crackdown on religious extremism in Xinjiang a genocide. All the articles I kept getting linked were “oh how terrible the situation there is, what an evil evil government” with no one seemingly caring about the actual people. It’s all just treated as an abstract talking point. And the only references boiling down to two reports by Adrian Zenz
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02634937.2018.1507997
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02634937.2021.1946483
a person with some questionable viewpoints
All the stuff around it seems to be pushed by Washington based anti-communist thinktanks trying to establish an “east turkestan”. The whole movement is heavily US-financed. See here for more info:
That’s what changed my mind about it all anyway, but like I said I probably will not be able to go into more depth about this, as I have spent too much time on this already.
Poe’s law strikes again. “What changed my mind were the tankies on hexbear who consistently were the most knowledgable on a topic” is just so on the nose that it might just be what some people actually think.
Right? I’m sitting here like “this has to be satire… right? But it’s just absurd enough not to be…”
It isn’t 😄
Not absurd at all imo. The “tankies” were always right, whatever that word even means these days.
It’s kinda like “woke” but used against leftists instead of socially progressive liberals (and leftists) to shut down discussion.
