I think it’s a healthy thing to do to admit when your wrong as it places importance on truth rather than self image.
Some examples:
I thought pay-per-view was paper-view because you had to fill out a form to watch it.
This morning I insisted there was a noise outside to my partner and it was in fact the refrigerant in the fridge gurgling.
I thought the cat wanted to be pet— it did not.
There are a few controversial subjects I’ve changed my mind about recently, and it only happened because someone actually took the time to engage with me instead of just hurling insults and trying to shut down the discussion. I’m not even going to specify what I changed my mind about, because I know I’d just get attacked again - for views I don’t even hold anymore.
Thought isn’t a crime we all deserve the chance to grow
I was wrong about capital punishment up into my twenties. It took someone sitting me down and explaining it’s more expensive to kill people than just jail them for life (along with why). These days I’m a bit ashamed that that was the argument that convinced me but that was among a few key watershed moments that pulled back the veil and got me thinking and noticing that fiscal conservatives somehow didn’t ever seem to pick the most sensible option to achieve their goals—clearly their goals aren’t what they claim. They want to reduce abortion, but not in ways that actually work. They want to reduce crime, but not in ways that actually work. Fuck, they want to balance budgets, but not in ways that actually work.
We’re all on a journey, friend. And sometimes that’s especially hard online because the strides we take are often attacked for being insufficient. People demand total, instant realignment, and you’re still attacked for not believing it all along. I’m glad most of my journey was not made on social media because I’ve certainly held some regrettable positions.
Good luck!
Kinda sounds like me when seatbelt laws came out.
At first, I was against them, not because I myself didn’t wear a seatbelt because I did, but because I thought it was absurd that we would waste time and money trying to make stupidity illegal.
Like if you make stupidity illegal, then the people making stupidity illegal would be illegal because it’s stupid to try to make stupidity illegal.
My opinion was that if you are stupid enough to drive a two ton death machine without basic protection and it kills you, then that’s your own stupid fault, right?
But my mind got changed about it when somebody mentioned to me that seatbelts don’t just save lives, they also reduce injuries.
And, given that the kind of person that is dumb enough to drive without a seatbelt is also the kind of person that is dumb enough to drive without insurance, the real reason for pushing for seatbelts was to reduce the taxpayer burden of covering the health care financial deficit caused by these stupid idiots.
It was not a life-saving measure, although it does save lives, but rather, it is a money-saving measure.
Protecting taxpayer money from stupid people is a smart move.
Now I am fully behind seatbelt laws.
I was super in favor of capital punishment until we had to do an essay on a controversial topic in my senior year of high school and as I was researching for it I was like “wait a minute this actually sucks ass.” Capital punishment kind of only “works” if your underlying assumption is that the justice system gets it right every time, which is not true at all. It also isn’t even a good deterrent- it makes no difference on capital crime rates whether the death penalty is a possibility or not. So the only reason to have it is that your own sense of “justice” requires criminals to be killed, even if it doesn’t actually help anything and even if it doesn’t prevent more crimes. And again, that denies any possibility that the justice system ever gets things wrong and wrongfully convicts someone.
Oh I was way shittier than that when I was younger. I mean I assumed they got it right almost every time and the couple of exceptions would be caught by appeals and such and it was such a vanishingly small number of actually innocent people that would be killed that it was an acceptable number.
That was before I saw stuff like proof people were innocent and DAs still fighting against them being released. It never occurred to me that expecting everyone in the justice system to seek real justice was completely naive of me. Of course police wouldn’t try to arrest someone they knew was innocent, and of course the DA wouldn’t prosecute and if they were ever made aware of a mistake, of course they would correct that immediately.
Turns out the world is largely made up of folks who genuinely don’t care if other people live or die or whether it’s right or wrong, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them at all.
My argument against capital punishment is that no legal system is foolproof and some number of innocent people are going to get locked up no matter what. That is aready unacceptable in itself but the idea of sentencing someone to death who hasn’t done anything wrong is the greatest injustice I can think of.
There’s even a saying about it. “I would rather a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent man be murdered”.
Sure, I’m just saying falling short of perfection is not the argument that swayed me. It took me time to get there.