Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even “unobtrusive” ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I’m all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
The average person shouldn’t be allowed to drive. It’s extremely dangerous and most people are desensitized to it and absolutely don’t take the natural responsibility towards others that comes with having the ability to kill someone with a finger twitch (or a slight lapse in attention) seriously enough. I don’t think it would be allowed if it was just invented this year.
Star Wars sucks.
Pansexual, polysexual, and omnisexual are all microlabels and are all subsets of bisexual. You don’t need more labels than gay, straight, and bi.
Edit: I forgot about asexuals. But I specifically only care about bi subsets. They’re dumb, and you only need bi
All religions should be heavily taxed. NO EXCEPTIONS!!
We don’t need more pronouns. We need less of them.
In my native language there is no even he/she pronouns. The word is “hän” and it’s gender neutral. You can be male, female, FTM, MTF, non-binary or what ever and you’re still called “hän”. You can identify as anything you like and “hän” already includes you.
Most people shouldn’t be parents.
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Edit: Added metric units
Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.
After an entity reaches an annual cap (say $5m profit), 95c of every dollar should be taxed
Tax is not theft
We have blown the concept of ownership way out of proportion. No one should be able to own things they have absolutely no connection to, like investment firms owning companies they don’t work for, houses they don’t live in or land they’ve never been to.
Most conservatives, however deeply red, are not intentionally hateful and are usually open to rational discussion. People just don’t know how to have rational discussions nowadays and the few times they do, they don’t know how to think like somebody else and put things in a way they can understand.
People nowadays think because a point convinced them, it should convince everybody else and anybody who’s not convinced by it is just being willfully ignorant. The truth is we all process things differently and some people need to hear totally different arguments to understand, often put in ways that wouldn’t convince you if you heard it.
It’s hard to understand other people and I feel like the majority of people have given up trying in favor of assuming everybody who disagrees with you knows their wrong and refuses to admit it.
If it wasn’t for their response to the pandemic, I might be inclined to agree with you.
It is very hard to have rational disccussion when people disagree on the basic observable facts, ignore the “rules” of debate, and are struggling with critical thinking. You can meet difficult people on all the political spectrum, but certain idealogy attract more difficult people, and certain stuff mainstream conservatives believe right now has absolutely no basis in reality.
You’re not outright wrong, but it’s really hard to have the rational discussion skills to cut through decades of propaganda. For the many deep in the right-ring bubble, brainwashing is a better term than mere propaganda.
I can agree with that. I’ve been part of a cult before (was born into it) and I can recognize a lot of what I went through there in far right people. I guess I’m just a little sensitive to people calling these people idiots and hateful people due to seeing myself in them. Like, to me, they’re (usually) just good people being manipulated into thinking the awful things they say and do are good, and they need a rational and caring person to pull them slowly out of it, the same way I did.
Obviously, it takes more than just talking usually to pull somebody out of a cult, but I think it’s still a big part of it. They’ve been fooled into thinking that things that are rational aren’t, and unless they’re confronted with the actual truth and the facts to back them up, they’re not going to even start to question their beliefs.
I’m also not suggesting that every person needs to debate every republican about every issue they bring up. If you can’t or even just don’t want to debate somebody, you don’t have any obligation to, but I don’t think insulting them over it is almost ever the right response.
There’s also the angle of how every cult teaches you that you’re going to be persecuted for your beliefs, and brainwashes you into thinking that should reaffirm you that you must be correct. That is one major reason I think labeling all conservatives as irrational and hopeless is dangerous. When somebody who’s been taught that the world is going to hate them for being “right” finds that the world does not, in fact, hate them, but instead just displays genuine concern, that’s when you fully start to question everything.
I don’t think every right winger is going to fling left when presented with this view. In fact, I think the vast majority won’t, but it will make them a little more understanding, and a little more understanding over the course of many years and generations adds up.
I was going to post my rant about conservatives as a top level comment, but I didn’t think it was unpopular enough.
I agree with your central premise that there is a disconnect of understanding and perception between progressives and conservatives.
However, it’s not that conservatives haven’t heard a convincing argument, or something that accounts for their perspective. This is part of the fundamental disconnect, and you’re an excellent example of why people don’t know how to put things in a way others will understand.
Conservativism is not a principled ideology. It is the political justification of narcissism in every form. Conservatives like being conservative because it gives them a free pass to be selfish and egocentric in their political beliefs. There is no foundational value system or policy that is inherently conservative.
The conservative ideology defines the self and the other. Nothing else is fixed. Whatever is good for the self is good, and whatever is bad for the self is bad.
That’s it, that explains every conservative position ever held by any conservative since the invention of conservativism in the 1800s. From Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wanting to roll back many of the reforms of the French Revolution, to Donald Trump becoming the Messiah, conservatives identify the self, and then do anything to benefit the self. Granted, Francois-Rene was a much better writer, but he was no less inconsistent in his desire to promote ideologies that benefitted himself and his peers.
Conservatives will couch their positions as staunch defense of tradition, and general opposition to change for the sake of change, but that’s window dressing. They don’t believe in stoicism or absolutism or really anything they claim to believe. And that’s why you cannot have a rational debate with a conservative. That’s why you won’t ever convince them to change their minds on a subject simply by pointing out flaws in their logic or perception.
The only method that has ever worked at getting a conservative to shift or compromise is by showing them how it will benefit them. Why is this policy good for the self? What value will they receive in exchange for easing up on their intransigence? If you can convince a conservative to abandon an ideological position, you can be sure it’s because they believe the new position is better for them.
Look at any conservative leader in history, any political pundit, any legislator or writer or conservative iconoclast. Viewed through the lens of narcissism, their intentions, their hypocrisies, their inconsistencies, they are all laid bare. There is no deeper meaning, no mystery to why they have had sudden changes or seemingly flip flopped on an issue. It’s not that complicated.
So no, it’s not that people don’t know how to have rational discussions these days. It’s that conservativism is anathema to rational thought, and it always has been. It’s a license to be as hateful or ignorant or selfish as you want to be, and you needn’t worry about defending your positions from things like facts, or realty, or reason, because those are tools of the other. If the other opposes you, they are evil and their reality, their facts, their reason is equally evil. They don’t need to be refuted, they need to be destroyed by any means necessary. The self is good, therefore anything the self needs to do to win is good. Lies, deception, personal attacks, intimidation, threats, violence, all of them are justified by the belief in the righteous self. There is no bar too low to be stooped under, no treachery too vile to be considered, no accusation too false to be levied. A conservative with scruples is a conservative unchallenged.
I have had plenty of conversations with people irl. Most of the them with people who are to the right of me on the political spectrum. What I found in the conversations that were fruitful, was that our disagreement on larger issues, such as economics or personal freedoms, tended to stem from disagreements on smaller issues. To paraphrase my friend, “We are using the same words, but they all mean different things.” It seems to me that there are some elementary differences between progressives and conservatives that change how we rationalize the larger issues. That’s how the two groups can, based on the same information, come to two different conclusions.
That being said though, I think Fox News and other conservative news channels have created information silos. Not everyone who is conservative has necessarily had access to the same body of facts and evidence that progressives have. I think a good portion of people who are stuck in those silos would change their views if they had a more balanced news diet.
research subjects who considered themselves conservative tended to have larger amygdala, the section of the brain in the temporal lobes that plays a major role in the processing of emotions. Self-defined liberals, meanwhile, generally had a larger volume of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain associated with coping with uncertainty and handling conflicting information.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/are-your-political-beliefs-hardwired-108090437/
Political neuroscience is an interesting field. I remember hearing about similar studies years ago on podcasts. A quick google revealed the field has had numerous studies done in the last year alone.
I don’t feel that this section inherently contradicts what I am trying to say and perhaps is intended to be supporting evidence. The fact that the differences between conservatives and liberals can be measured means that the disagreements stem from a real place. However, the article mentions that this does not mean agreement is impossible. It means that the two groups need to be approached differently with the same information.
Andrea Kuszewski, a researcher who has written about political neuroscience, would rather put a positive spin on what it could mean for politics. She says this kind of knowledge could help open up communication, or at least ease hostility between the country’s two major political parties.
“Each side is going to have to recognize that not everyone thinks like them, processes information like them, or values the same types of things,” she wrote last week. “With the state our country is in right now, I don’t think we have any choice but to cowboy up and do whatever needs to be done in order to reach some common ground.”
Do you mind elaborating on the intention of sharing the quoted section of the linked article? I don’t want to assume and I want to engage with what you mean.
Yeah this would have been believable 2-3 years ago but not post pandemic.
Except half od them are QAnon believers.
are usually open to rational discussion
Are they believers? If they are, your assertion is false.
Religion is nothing more then social engineering on a grand scale.
Cult + time = religion.
In which fundamentalist hell hole is that an unpopular idea?
It’s not. OTOH it’s nonsense. The social engineering came late. First it was a primitive attempt to explain the unknown and give meaning to the meaningless.
Sure. But it’s the 21st century now. We can drop it.
We should. It’s not likely to happen any time soon, though.
People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.