My best friend had this happen to him. Except he’s over 30.
He now worships T×m P×ol, El×n M×sk, and J×e R×gan. He also thinks that Tr×mp is “the ultimate epic troll”.
He finally started saying that c×vid is fake & trans folks should be “purged”. He also still thinks that you can catch AIDS from a toilet seat or a handshake.
His critical thinking skills have eroded to the point where I don’t even recognize him anymore. He just parrots talking points from grifter podcasts.
We are no longer friends. I miss the “old” him everyday.
Why the fuck are you censoring what you post? You’re not going to get banned for wrongthink, this isn’t reddit.
It’s to protect myself from folks who will inevitably search these terms and harass others who criticize these people.
This platform is growing, and I will take precautions to keep myself safe.
I almost. Thankfully I caught on quick that these people didn’t care about the truth but rather pushing a narrative.
Both ultra alt-right and far-left are cringy weirdos imo. A healthy diet consists of laughing at both sides. Otherwise you end up on one side or the other /shrug.
Yeah, I was on that slide for a bit, probably around that age as well. Luckily I was too socially awkward to ever bother anyone with it, just kept to myself and watched that garbage.
Wanna know the slightly embarrassing thing that made me reevaluate? One of the channels I watched, which up to this point had almost exclusively made anti-feminist videos, suddenly made a video bashing furries in the same way. I wasn’t a furry, but I had friends who were and it’s usually a very friendly space for a harmless hobby. So I thought, “this is stupid, why would he make a video bashing these people who aren’t harming anyone?” and then it clicked. Took a break from that space and never went back.
So, thanks furries
Honestly, this is a huge mistake on their part. The right’s been testing anti-furry messaging, complete with breathless misinformation (litter boxes in the bathrooms, anyone?), and I don’t think that it’s going well because it never seems to stick around for long. Furryism is popular enough that most working age adults and teens know someone who’s a furry or are one themselves, and they, like most folks, are generally nice people who just want to be left in peace. By contrast, I don’t think most folks know or know that they know a trans person, so it’s easier to sell fearmongering bullshit with regards to them.
The ‘litter boxes in the bathrooms’ continues to come up, like clockwork every few months. It’s absurd. As fucking if anyone has ever actually put a litter box in a bathroom in a gods damned school.
I assume someone did put a litterbox in a school bathroom to bully some kid. We had a girl who liked to pretend to be a cat in grade 7 and people would bark at her and shed hiss and run away, wouldn’t surprise me in the least if someone had put a litterbox in the bathroom to bully her. Never did see her again after that year I assume she did homeschooling/distance learning after that.
I doubt most people know an open furry. But there’s always been antifurry hate since they’re kinda weird and niche and you can always try and link them to bestiality but just like now its always just been a thinly veiled wedge to start hating on gay and trans people and really anyone different. I think a lot more people understand intellectually someone who was born male but identifies as a woman than the whole fursona thing. Honestly antifurry rhetoric seems like an easy predictor to all kinds of minority hate. Love the litter box in the bathroom one have to tell people that’s obviously stupid all the time.
It’s interesting to look at cultural values now versus the past and wonder what the future will be like and what we (as in folks in the present) will be embarrassed about or scolded for. I definitely think Furries are one. (Edit: hating Furries I mean.)
So many people think it is about beastiality. Sure, some Furries have fetishes related to being in fur suits and sure I bet there exists at least one Furry who is into beastiality but that’s not the norm at all. I think because people don’t know people who are Furries they either find out about them through fear mongering lies or they hear about the few times that actually bad Furries do something and assume it’s the norm.
I fully expect my descendants to be embarrassed to bring their robot friends around me when I’m old because I’ll say something like “I used to be a programmer” and they’ll be like “you can’t say stuff like that, they take it as you saying you want to control them” and I’ll just be confused and apologetic.
For me, I always considered myself egalitarian, but what happened is I bought into their talking points that SJWs and feminists were actually just misandrists seeking special treatment. I don’t think I was truly in danger of becoming a hateful bigot or voting for hateful bigots, but I certainly carried some of their talking points.
What snapped me out of it was one day watching one of these chuds do a video where they took like a politics or social values quiz of some sort, and I saw they didn’t truly believe in equality. It was that that made me realize, “Wait, these guys actually believe some things I fundamentally disagree with.” Basically they showed their power level.
So thanks, random misogynistic youtuber for showing me your true colors.
Like you with the furries, it goes to show that all it really takes is one moment of what they’re saying not matching up with what you know to be true.
Got into the Atheist youtubers, then they moved onto anti-SJW and I stuck around. Thought I was being an enlightened logical centrist, “both sides are bad” and all that. So I figured modern feminists were overreacting.
Then the MAGA movement ramped up, now abortion rights are gone. Also since then I discovered I’m trans and now LGBT rights are at stake.
Really makes me look back on the days of us making fun of women with dyed hair shrieking over Trump winning. They were right, they were reacting appropriately and I was a fool to not see it. (Just want to emphasize that I’m not a Trump supporter, I just didn’t think things would get this bad)
Wow, something very similar happened to me! Instead of realising I was trans, I got a lot of queer friends and felt actual love and suddenly I was 100 times more empathetic which horrified me when I thought of how nasty I’d thought of people before.
HRT helped me actually feel again, and empathy made me realize that thinking “logic is superior” is really stupid and even thinking there’s a seperation between emotion and logic in politics is really stupid. Oftentimes logic is just justification and obfuscation of an emotional opinion.
The final nail in the coffin for me was when I stumbled on this Martin Luther King quote about how the moderate is the true obstacle for civil rights, those “who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom”.
It made me realize how stupid it is to negotiate with fascists and bureaucracy. That we should get angry, we should get emotional, we should get active and maybe violent, when we see human beings stop being treated as such.
