When did you last change your opinion?

[Esceptico]

I mean an important opinion or viewpoint, not which burger chain is the best!

Most of the time on here (and in the real world) it seems that people have very fixed opinions and aren’t really open to having them changed. Debates and discussions don’t really go anywhere as few people listen.

The recent thread on abortion brought this up for me. I was very pro choice when I was younger. Looking back I think I was heavily influenced by my opposition to religion (particularly evangelical Christians) and as they were pro life I automatically associated with the opposing viewpoint. Over the years, especially after becoming a parent, my support for abortion has waned considerably, in particular after reading about the secular, ethical objections to it.

I used to be pro asylum and immigration. My position has changed considerably. I was ignorant of or didn’t really give much credence to the problems that immigration can bring to the indigenous population. Having said that, there were far fewer immigrants when I was growing up so some of the problems were less apparent. Overall I’m still pro immigration but think it needs to be controlled more tightly (although to be fair that ship has probably sailed already as far as the U.K. is concerned).

I voted remain. Jury still out on that to be honest. However, I am willing to concede I was wrong if there are demonstrable benefits that outweigh the negatives.

Have you had a big change of opinion? If so for what and why did you change?

[Esceptico]

DRFC1879 said:

sociopath said:

DRFC1879 said:

I've certainly become far more open-minded over the last 20 years.

Coming from a fairly impoverished Northern mining town it was easy to be a bit bigotted. Suspicion/dislike of people of colour, homosexuals etc. was the norm. I cringe when I think of some of the things I said and believed as a teenager.

It wasn't really until I came into more contact with people from these minority groups that I realised they are just like anyone else. Most of them are absolutely fine, some of them are dheads. We're all people at the end of the day. I like to think that these days I don't judge anyone on anything other than their behaviour.

Whereas I came from the same (there was only one black family in town), and I think me and my old school buddies weren't bigoted because we had nothing to be bigoted about, and no experience of it.

And when one of our school friends came out, the general response was "ok, wanna beer?"

I get that but as there were probably half a dozen non-whites in my school year of 400 kids they did stand out somewhat and the labels that you'd hear growing up in the 80's were pretty much as you'd expect: "P-ki, nig-nog" etc. and anyone camp on TV was a "poof." As a child I didn't know any better but as I grew up it became very clear that those terms and the associated attitudes are just wrong on every level. I would guess that if I'd grown up in London, surrounded by people form all sorts of backgrounds the differences would have been less noticeable or remarkable.

This

There seems to be some crazy revisionist behaviour on both sides of the racism issue. On the one hand you have the nonsense narrative about the presence of non whites in the UK - prior to WWII there were almost none. Even growing up in the 70s, if you didn’t live in very specific parts of the UK you would rarely meet non white people.

On the other hand you have people claiming that there wasn’t much racism in the past. Nonsense. The few non whites in my school received constant racist abuse - up to and including physical abuse. People of my parents and grandparents, even (or perhaps because) if they had no direct experience of non whites were routinely racist.

I suggest anyone doubting should read Burmese Days by Orwell (based heavily on his time in Burma). The attitudes towards the Burmese and Indians is pretty shocking by today’s standard but was the norm for the time.