When was the last time you changed your mind about something politically important and admitted it?

[Rogue AI]

Around 90% of those taken in by ICE have NO CRIMINAL RECORD.

That means 90% of their resources are going after non-criminals, and only 10% towards getting the dangerous criminals off the street.

Are we safer deporting farm workers, or murderers and rapists?

100% are criminals, sorry, try harder.

 

[Foxfyre]

You're right. I don't know you personally. I only know the version of yourself you've chosen to present here, and that version delivered a long declaration of absolute certainty, tribal loyalty, and moral finality, then walked away the second it was challenged.

That’s not about me judging you. That’s about you refusing to examine yourself. If you're confident in your beliefs, then scrutiny shouldn’t offend you, but when someone holds up a mirror and your first instinct is to say “you don’t know me” that’s not strength, it’s retreat. It’s the exact response I called out. Certainty so brittle that even the possibility of reflection feels like an attack.

You said you can't imagine changing your mind. I asked why that is. That’s not self-righteousness. That’s an invitation, one you just proved you're not ready to accept.

So I’ll leave it with this...

If your vision of America is so fragile that it can’t survive honest questions, maybe what you’re protecting isn’t the country. Maybe it’s just the comfort of never having to look deeper.

You aren't even representing what I posted honestly though. I challenge you to post anything I've said in its full context that fits how you are characterizing me.

 

[Anomalism]

OR, we are so used to dishonest and bad faith questions about America, that we are not open to discussion with hostile bad faith critics.

This response is exactly what happens when someone confuses emotional shielding with discernment. You're not answering my question. You're dodging it by framing all critique as an attack, so you never have to confront the substance.

How do you tell the difference between bad faith criticism and uncomfortable truth? If your filter labels every challenge as an attack, how would you ever know if you were the one who got it wrong? This isn’t about hating America. It’s about loving it enough to ask what version we’re actually defending, and whether that version holds up to the values we claim.

If your only standard for listening is whether it feels good or aligns with your team, you’re not protecting America. You’re protecting your feelings and calling it patriotism.

So I ask again. If your side lied, if your comfort was built on a false story, would you even want to know, or have you already decided that anyone asking that question must be the enemy?

 

[Anomalism]

To question RIGHT and WRONG is to embrace WRONGness.

For the seventy-third consecutive year, my family is gathering on a property which we have owned for more than a century this afternoon. They will spend the day eating, drinking, and celebrating our family, our beliefs, and the Patriarch of our family, who came here with his wife from Eastern Europe in 1910.

Among the activities will be an updating of the Family Tree… a massive sheet of fabric showing the entire family descended from my great-grandfather. The ladies will update the image, adding new entries for births, marriages, and deaths. Unfortunately this year the men of the family have the unpleasant task of removing a branch from the tree. A branch that chose WRONGness over RIGHTeousness and must now be cut off and all contact with banned. It will be unpleasant, but it must be done.

This is not just rigidity. It’s ritualized absolutism. A worldview where questioning is equated with betrayal, and obedience is mistaken for honor. Your response isn’t about truth. It’s about control masquerading as legacy.

You just made my point for me. You say questioning right and wrong is embracing wrongness, but if something falls apart when it's questioned, was it ever right to begin with? Truth doesn’t fear examination, only dogma does.

And then, as if to prove the power of that fear, you described a literal family ritual where dissent is punished by erasure. Not debate. Not reflection. Erasure. You’re not preserving morality. You’re enforcing conformity by exile. That’s not tradition. That’s authoritarianism.

You speak of righteousness, but you treat belief like a bloodline, something to be inherited, not earned. The branch you’re cutting? That’s not weakness. That’s someone strong enough to question the script, and that terrifies you, because deep down, you know what it would mean if they’re not wrong. It would mean your whole tree might be rooted in something unexamined.

So go ahead, update your fabric. Pretend erasure is justice, but one day, someone in your family will look at that empty branch and wonder why questioning became the unforgivable sin, and that crack, however small, will be the beginning of truth's return.

 

[Anomalism]

Are you open to the possiblity that MAGA is right on this, and it is YOU that is failing to look at yourself and where YOU are coming from?

Yes. If MAGA is right about something, I want to know. That’s the difference. I don’t need a side to win. I want the truth to win, and if something I believe can’t survive honest confrontation, then I don’t want it. I’ll throw it out and start again.

Let's turn your question around. Are you open to the possibility that MAGA might be wrong about some of this? And I don’t mean a surface-level acknowledgment. I mean truly open, rnough to change, enough to let go of something cherished, enough to disappoint your team or your family or your sense of certainty for the sake of something closer to the truth?

 

[postman]

100% are criminals, sorry, try harder.

Under that logic, the FBI should take 90% of the agents that go after terrorists and serial killers, and assign them to arrest people for marijuana possession to boost their arrest numbers.

 

[dblack]

Think back.

Not just something minor or trendy. Something you genuinely believed until you didn’t.

If that hasn’t happened in a long time, maybe you’ve stopped thinking. Most people don’t grow. They just settle into a political costume and call it wisdom.

They pick a side, inherit the script, memorize the heroes, and build their identity around never questioning it again, but if your views never evolve, maybe your values aren’t values; they’re habits.

If you can’t remember the last time you were wrong, then you’re probably still wrong about something right now.

The biggest change in my politics, over the last ten years, is my appreciation of consensus and stable government. Thrashing back and forth between partisan extremes is foolish.

 

[buttercup]

To question RIGHT and WRONG is to embrace WRONGness.

Of course there is an objective right and wrong. It's not about questioning whether right and wrong exists. But if you think you have ALWAYS been right about everything in your entire life, that is extremely unrealistic and rooted in pride and stubbornness imo. You're basically saying "none of my beliefs have ever been wrong." If that's the case, you haven't grown, learned or genuinely examined all your views with a desire to always put truth first. Because the ONLY being who has ever been right all the time is God. And you aren't God.

 

[Anomalism]

Although I know I will, I don’t mean to offend you.
You’re starting to sound like that circle-talking batshit crazy Professor at Berkeley. You say alot of feel-good things using big neat shiny words but you’re not really saying anything profound or compelling.
You basically keep saying “Don’t forge a firm belief system that you can stay committed to, always allow others to morph your convictions into something else for you.”
Do you realize what that sounds like to people who share the same beliefs and follow the same moral order as all the good Americans before us?
Your lecture should have been aimed at the unconventionals exclusively….It is the Berkeley professor and the batshitshit crazy purple hair nose ringers who need to hear what you have to say…We’ve just been doing it the way it’s always been done here…nothing complex about it.

That response says a lot.

You say I’m not being profound, but you basically just admitted it made you uncomfortable, so much so, you had to reduce it to “wordy nonsense” just to dismiss it without having to engage.

You heard a challenge to inherited certainty, and your reaction wasn’t to examine it; it was to shove it away by painting it as foreign, fringe, or “unconventional.” That’s not debate. That’s deflection. You needed to reframe me as some caricature, some Berkeley professor or nose-ringed activist, because if the person saying this sounds even remotely like you, then you might actually have to listen. But you don’t want to listen. You want to feel safe in a story that says, “We’ve just been doing it the way it’s always been done here.” Do you hear yourself? That’s not patriotism. That’s autopilot. That’s tradition used as insulation from responsibility. You say your views are the same as the “good Americans before us” as if morality was settled in advance, and questioning it is inherently radical.

Every moral leap this country has ever made, every expansion of freedom, dignity, justice, was made by someone willing to question what came before. If you think “doing it the way it’s always been done” is a defense, ask yourself what that same logic would’ve said to abolitionists, suffragettes, civil rights leaders, or anyone who ever stepped outside the line. You’re not upholding virtue. You’re preserving comfort, and that’s fine, until you start mistaking that comfort for truth. If you’re so sure your convictions are strong, they should be able to withstand questions, so why do you keep dodging them?

 

[Rogue AI]

Under that logic, the FBI should take 90% of the agents that go after terrorists and serial killers, and assign them to arrest people for marijuana possession to boost their arrest numbers.

Not really, it is more a matter of collecting the criminal scum wherever and whenever they are encountered. If they are seeking a particular criminal dirtbag invader and happen upon a nest of vermin, they should certainly deport all of them without exception.

 

[postman]

Not really, it is more a matter of collecting the criminal scum wherever and whenever they are encountered. If they are seeking a particular criminal dirtbag invader and happen upon a nest of vermin, they should certainly deport all of them without exception.

Possession of Marijuana is still a federal crime. Those people are criminals, or scum as you would call them.
They need the FBI to divert resources from terrorism, and go after those potheads

Right. They're all criminals.

 

[Gary Seven]

I had a moment of reckoning about 6 months after the 2008 election.

 

[Rogue AI]

Possession of Marijuana is still a federal crime. Those people are criminals, or scum as you would call them.
They need the FBI to divert resources from terrorism, and go after those potheads

Right. They're all criminals.

They could be responsible human beings and just go home without having to piss away even more of our resources. Of course such vermin will not do so and thus it falls to government to enforce our laws. Why on Earth anyone would want such scum here is beyond me.

 

[postman]

I had a moment of reckoning about 6 months after the 2008 election.

I had mine 8 months before the 2016 election.
When McConnell said not to put people on the supreme court so close to a presidential election.

 

[postman]

They could be responsible human beings and just go home without having to piss away even more of our resources. Of course such vermin will not do so and thus it falls to government to enforce our laws. Why on Earth anyone would want such scum here is beyond me.

Are you talking about the marijuana smokers?

Yeah, we need to divert resources to arrest the lot of them.

In 2023, 17% of Americans, or approximately 55 million adults, reported using marijuana, according to a Gallup poll.

 

[Anomalism]

Would have been better if it were an example that Anathema held....

Or at least more recent in modern usage.

I'm not well versed in the pro-slavery arguments of the day. Mostly from what I've heard they were "shit talkers".

You’re proving the point.

You say you're not well-versed in the pro-slavery arguments, but that’s exactly the problem. People who believed in it back then didn’t walk around thinking “we’re the villains.” They thought they were defending order, tradition, faith, the family structure; the same pillars people still invoke today, just under new topics.

They weren’t “shit talkers.” They were legislators, preachers, professors, and neighbors. They believed they were on the side of good. That’s what makes moral certainty so dangerous. It doesn’t feel evil. It feels obvious.

You asked for a concrete example. I gave you one. Now you're shifting the goalpost by saying it’s too old, too far removed, but if the principle doesn't hold up over time, it was never a principle; it was a mood dressed in tradition.

So let’s bring it closer...

Interracial marriage was illegal in parts of the U.S. until 1967. The moral arguments against it were biblical, traditional, and "timeless."

Women couldn’t vote until 1920. The argument? It would disrupt the natural social order, and that men were better suited for rational decision-making.

Gay marriage was opposed by both parties for decades using appeals to morality, family values, and religious certainty. It’s now legal, and the sky didn’t fall.

Each of these views was defended as obvious, righteous, and unchangeable, until someone questioned what everyone else called truth. That’s not ancient history. That’s your grandparents.

Would you like more examples?

 

[Mac-7]

Anomalism

Are you on a fishing expedition?

You should have led the way by telling us the last time you were seriously wrong

Instead you let others be the guinea pigs

 

[postman]

Of course if we went after all those evil marijuana smoking criminals, we'd have to build more prisons.

In 2022, there were approximately 1.8 million people incarcerated in the United States, including those in state prisons, federal prisons, and local jails.

approximately 55 million adults, reported using marijuana, according to a Gallup poll.

 

[Rogue AI]

Are you talking about the marijuana smokers?

Yeah, we need to divert resources to arrest the lot of them.

In 2023, 17% of Americans, or approximately 55 million adults, reported using marijuana, according to a Gallup poll.

Any and all illegal aliens dirtbags that suck up our resources. I see no reason for any distinction between one type of criminal invader to another.

 

[postman]

So let’s bring it closer...

Interracial marriage was illegal in parts of the U.S. until 1967. The moral arguments against it were biblical, traditional, and "timeless."

Women couldn’t vote until 1920. The argument? It would disrupt the natural social order, and that men were better suited for rational decision-making.

Gay marriage was opposed by both parties for decades using appeals to morality, family values, and religious certainty. It’s now legal, and the sky didn’t fall.

Each of these views was defended as obvious, righteous, and unchangeable, until someone questioned what everyone else called truth. That’s not ancient history. That’s your grandparents.

Would you like more examples?

There's integration of the military.
And women serving in the military.

Both thought to be the ruin of unit cohesion.