Another on the Starship Troopers thing. When I first saw it, my response was “What the fuck? I’m rooting for the bugs!” and also fan-boy annoyance. I didn’t get the satire at the time. I’d still like to see a more straightforward version though.
Never saw showgirls.
Not exactly a change of opinion, because I figured it out a long time ago, but the board’s several denunciation’s of the “Nice Guy[sup]tm[/sup]” looking for a date was nicely done, and I really wish the SDMB had been around 20 years ago, when I actually needed this advice.
There have been too many to count, but the biggie happened fairly recently, and convinced me to scrap my plans for an education degree and go for a business or accounting degree. There was a poster whose name I will not mention who was having money woes and complaining about his utilities being shut off. I read it, and noted that he worked a fairly typical Gen-X job which didn’t pay quite enough for real support. While we didn’t get along, I felt kind of sorry for him, because no one really deserves that, and because he was obviously a smart, multi-talented guy. I was shocked to find out that he was in his 40’s, because I had assumed from the OP that he was in his early 20’s and working to support himself through college.
The thread got me thinking about my own life, and how I was in my late 30’s, and working kind of a crap job and suddenly my 40th birthday seemed to actually loom over my life. Time to get moving, Linty :dubious: . It’s a little late for you to be a rock star. I looked at my talents, and decided that a masters in business would make a whole lot more sense than a masters in education. Not only would it make my talents more marketable, it would also help me plan for such niceties as retirement (planning for which, btw, this board also convinced me was more important than I realized).
And in case that guy reads this and recognizes himself, man, in spite of our differences, good luck, and I hope you’ve gotten through the worst of it.
The biggie is probably that my views of religion have changed, but not in the direction of the semi-consensus of the board. I used to be more tolerant and less hostile.
Wow! That’s pretty amazing. I didn’t think that could happen here.
Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words to Archibald Stuart in 1791 may help: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
I, for one, am convinced that it is our social programming that causes us to do this. If it were otherwise, why wouldn’t warriors from atheist nations and from polytheistic societies ask for the Abrahamic God to protect them? And how come it doesn’t seem to work very well, anyway?
It’s been a real pleasure to watch you change those views, BTW.
I don’t know that the SDMB has caused me to change any opinions, but it certainly has caused me to take a much deeper look at my opinions and why I think/feel the way I do. I think that’s pretty important.
I haven’t changed any opinions that I can recall, but I do enjoy hearing the atheist point of view. At my school most everybody is either Christian, or worse yet, claims to be Christian but really doesn’t give a fuck.
I don’t think my values have changed, but I think I’m better at knowing to keep some to myself, and how to defend others tooth and nail.
Same here. I was a bit of a homophobe before, and while I didn’t really participate in any related threads here, reading various posts on homosexuality and LBGT issues made me stop and realize “OK, not liking gay/trans-gendered people doesn’t actually make any sense, so why am I still doing it?”.
De-clawing cats. As in before I started reading about it on the dope, and ended up with a cat I thought it was similar to removing dew-claws on dogs. I went from “it’s not a problem” to “no way in hell would I do this to a cat”.
You guys (in part) changed me from Christian to atheist.
Flying cars are an inherently bad idea.
Add me to the two previous who mentioned the gun thing.
Interesting. I was all excited to come in here and mention how my opinion about guns had been changed, how interesting and unique of me!, but I’m apparently part of a groundswell.
I wonder if the reason is the same… I grew up with basically liberal parents in a liberal state (California) where one does not often encounter guns. So I early on adopted general liberal-democrat views as my general starting place for political beliefs, and then as I went out into the world and started encountering real life situations, I actually thought about various issues and started to hold a belief I really “owned”, rather than just a default liberal one. Most such issues (gay rights, abortion rights) I’ve ended up holding the same belief I started with, just with better justification. The big one I’ve at least somewhat switched on is gun control, and it didn’t really happen until fairly lateish in life for me (I was 26ish when I joined the SDMB) because it just never came up before then. The number of people I know IRL who own guns is tiny, and it just hadn’t been an issue that I’d really had the opportunity to put much thought into on an ongoing basis until participating in some SDMB debates.
(Which is not to say that I now have the opinion that Crafter Man and his ilk want me to have…)
To put it another way, if one grows up liberal and then becomes increasingly libertarian on social issues, the biggets “name” issue that you will have to reconsider your position on is gun control, and I suspect that general pattern is one a lot of dopers have undergone. (Arguably you’d need to switch your position on affirmative action as well, depending on how libertarian you ended up being.)