Ex-SJWs

[An Ghost]

maybe I didn't explain it so well.

Have you ever done a complete mental U-turn on something? Have you ever gone from loving one thing one minute to hating it the second? Like for example, you love house of cards until kevin spacey comes out as a paedophile and they fire him; meaning there will never be a real ending to this series you like, making you dislike it. I know I have, I don't know a person who hasn't but usually these are just the small things, like what food you like or hobby you have.
Politics makes these small things into extremes. You pick up a tumblr blog; now all men are rapists and you hate them. You join a very far right group; now all jews and blacks must die. Election night is close; anyone who doesn't vote for ______ is a faggot and should kill themselves.
Point is, politics is very good at selling stuff like this to people, that stuff is hate. Not the wishy washy worthless kind of hate, like a flavour of marmalade you dislike or an allergy, but a real burning hatred you're willing to base your identity, life and future towards. The kind tumblr SJW's inject themselves full of hormones over to fight an enemy that doesn't exist (or barely does) or the kind a KKK would organise a lynching over (making them the monsters they always cry about).
Something else to note is that this kind of hate feels good, it feels good to have an enemy or an adversery to fight against. It's why I think so many people believe in the Abrahamic religions because there's a clear villain to struggle against (the devil). This kind of pure hatred is addictive and most people will use any reason they have to keep feeling it, either so they can ignore the self hatred they have for themselves (pretty common amongst sjw's) or so they can feel like they have a purpose in life.

TLDR: people have complete changes in thought because they like being the victim and having an enemy, even if that enemy doesn't exist

A little late reply but I just saw this.
I’ve been worried about leaning too far right lately and it has been affecting my personal life. I have realized the error in my thoughts.
This post is very level headed. It is a good post.

 

[queerape]

Former SJW here. I left when I started dating a cis het white guy and I saw how horrible these people were to my boyfriend. He laughed at them though. I then realized I felt far freer with him and my friends from our home town than the SJWs I'd been hanging out with, and I was really only with the SJWs because I wanted to escape my identity and my past. When I was with them I didn't have to monitor or police my every word, and I chose to embrace my identity and past instead.

It was a pretty exit stage left from the SJW community for me. Last they know is I started dating some dirty cishet white dude and fucked right off to my hometown.

 

[BlessedVeggie]

I’ve never been a complete SJW, in my opinion. However, over the years I’ve become online “friends” with several of them. For a time, I entertained some of their ideas, or at least believed (and to a degree, I still do) that they should be free to think or do whatever they want. I treat them as any other person, right, left, center, whatever. But lately I’ve become more and more sick of dealing with my online acquaintances, to the point I first started to come here to “detox” after having particularly exhausting conversations with some of them.


As everyone says, being surrounded by SJW is like in a race to be the most victimized, the most edgy, the most offended. And it’s completely unacceptable to question anything about the world, about LGBT, about governmental or political systems. You must constantly be using the correct wording, no jokes, just nod and say insubstantial things like “OMG it’s so valid!!!” or “this is for gays only, uwu” or even better yet, don’t say anything and just nod to anything the group thinks is woke. And everyone around you must act the same way, or you need to cut ties with them completely, no questions asked.


The thing that gets me the most about this people is the constant reductionism about everything. Anyone in the center or the right is a Nazi, all businessmen & entrepreneurs are evil, all rich people are evil, all white are evil (except them if they happen to be a rich white girl), all men are evil and so on. Only they are allowed to have individual characteristics, as long as it is about sexuality or mental disorders of course.


My parents are a former navy dude that is super religious and right-leaning, and an agnostic doctor that’s all about the environment, animal rescue and helping people. For me they’ve always been the example that people can get along as long they are sincere about their differences and willing to cooperate. And here this people come along starting shit with me because I don’t think Bill Gates should drown in a septic tank for being richer than me, or that Homer Hickam should get cancer because he policed the tone of a brave trans womyn.


The SJW that regularly hassles me about everything I do and what company I keep has done to turn me against her side than any alt-right chucklehead. But of course, if you ask her she’ll say I was a Nazi from the start, uwu. After all, I'm "white-passing", what a blight.

 

[TheImportantFart]

So, I'm curious if there are other Kiwis who used to be SJWs, members of the Queer Community™, radical leftists, members of AntiFa, etc.

I was never an SJW per se, but I used to be a lot more left-leaning than I am now. I thought modern-day feminism was still a completely necessary thing (even though I've never identified as a feminist), making a fuss about diversity and inclusion was likewise a necessary thing, somewhat bought into the idea the idea that gender was socially constructed and fluid and that systemic oppression was a thing and I was also a lot more pro-welfare, government intervention and gun control than I am now.

This was all around 2012-13, and I can still remember when the 2012 election was happening being terrified by the prospect of a Romney victory.

Why did you decide to leave?

It actually started with something (mostly) unrelated to politics. In the period I mentioned above (2012-13) I considered myself a theist and attended church. My housemates at the time were quite strong atheists and while they'd never really confront me over my beliefs, they would make noises about how God didn't exist and religion was bullshit and I found I never really had any satisfactory arguments to challenge them.

I began looking around the internet for strong arguments for God and religion, reading stuff by people like Alister McGrath, William Lane Craig and John Lennox and watching debates between them and atheists. I also began watching videos by atheist channels to get a handle on their arguments. You've probably already guessed where this is going - this exercise had the exact opposite intended effect and I went from being a theist to an agnostic to an atheist in under a year.

You're probably also wondering what all that has to do with the question the OP posed. Well, that was just setting the scene. Here's where things really began.

While I was searching for stuff to reinforce my faith in God, I stumbled across the RationalWiki page for The Amazing Atheist. At the time I had no idea what RationalWiki was or that it had reputation, but I read the page which spent a lot of time bashing TJ for being an anti-feminist and accepted it said everything at face value. I asked myself what kind of jerk would be an anti-feminist and mentally decided he was a woman hater and I should never watch his videos.

I know The Amazing Atheist is considered a lolcow on here, but morbid curiosity got the better of me and I watched one of his anti-feminist videos and ended up being pleasantly surprised. Far from being an angry woman-hating screed, I saw a guy presenting reasonable arguments for why feminism these days is kind of silly and pointing out innumerable double standards in the way men are treated by society which feminists are more than happy to ignore. It was all basic bitch stuff, but it did the trick.

I then began reading RationalWiki a bit more and saw that while they were perfectly happy to smack down the No True Scotsman fallacy on Christians complaining about how atheists were tarring them all with the same brush, they had a curious blind spot for this same argument being applied to feminism and social justice. I also read their page about misandry where they said it didn't exist and a bunch of other stupid articles and that pushed me even further away, so congrats RationalWiki - like me when I was trying to justify my belief in God you did the opposite of what you set out to do.

Then in late 2014 I started watching Sargon and related channels intermittently (before he became a full-blown cow), joined up here, GamerGate and the SJW phenomenon began to blow up and I've never really looked back.

What were some of the difficulties you had when you decided to get out?

Thankfully I haven't really had any. None of my family is particularly politically active and I haven't lost that many friends.

One of my former housemates who I mentioned earlier is a feminist and when I was still getting to grips with anti-feminism we'd have the occasional heated argument over things like the pay gap and gendered insults, but we're still friends to this day. Considering she uses Tumblr quite a lot, that's a fucking miracle.

More recently, I got into a debate with another friend about whether gender was a social construct and non-binary pronouns (she was for, I was against), but it was very cordial and reasonable and we're still friends.

There was an incident where I posted an article on Facebook showing that my alma matter had one of the worst records for free speech on campus and got into a heated argument with one of my Facebook friends who didn't believe in free speech because racism and sexism. He hasn't unfriended me and commented positively on something I posted more recently, but the fact I have someone who speaks out against free speech on my Facebook friends list bothers me.

That's actually the biggest difficulty I've had - I did an Arts degree and worked in the film industry for a little bit so tons of my Facebook friends are massive lefties/SJWs which means I get all kinds of stupid shit coming up on my Facebook timeline (if you follow the Social Justice Warriors thread you'll know all about that). I'm a lot more careful about who I add now.

But I consider myself pretty privileged that's the worst I've had to deal with.

Do you think we will see more people leaving these communities as time goes on?

I hope so. SJWs are getting so crazy these days I'll actually get depressed if more people don't start waking up.

What sorts of crazy things did you do while you were still into it?

Not much, because I'm not someone who gets really vocal about things, but I used to beat the drum pretty hard for gay marriage and made some truly cringy Facebook statuses.

I also used to believe socialism wasn't such a bad idea

When you left it behind, did your ideological views swing to the right, or did they simply become more moderate?

I'd say I've gotten a bit more right wing, but I still believe in a lot of stuff I did back then. I'm still pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, believe in equality of opportunity (but not necessarily outcome) for the races and sexes and yes, I'm still an atheist. I've dropped the more than two genders and diversity bullshit and I now firmly believe capitalism is the best economic system in the world today, but overall I'd say I've just become more moderate.

 

[QWXXP Surprise!]

I was a TERF-hating tranny lover full of white/cis guilt and genuinely believe tr00ny lies and genderspecial bullshit.

All of that changed when I met a "real" transwoman.
Holy fuck. When meeting one of the people you're supposed to be e-whiteknighting for is what turns you off the whole movement, you know shit's bad.
And this was a real transwoman- was seeing a therapist, was in the process of getting a name change, surgery, HRT, everything.
Not one of those "fake trans" the movement loves to claim exists. (If you're for self-ID, is there really such a thing as "fake trans"?)

I realized that the whole thing is extremely sexist and categorizes people into the very boxes they want to break out of.
I think it was when he mentioned lasering off his body hair and buying expensive fucking makeup because "I need to pass!" that really got me to take a step back and wonder if this movement is being propped up by people who would stand to profit off this, because a lot of this shit is fucking expensive. (Spoilers- it is.)

I think it was just that + cries of "Cultural Appropriation!11" that really got me to walk away from the whole movement.

Now I just stay off that shit and live a much happier, peaceful life.

 

[Night Owl]

I was never a complete SJW, but I low-key agreed with many of their points when I was younger and stupider.

About 10 years ago or so I became a rabid yaoi fangirl because it was something new and exotic (I live in a moderately conservative post-socialist country where even today hardly anyone brings up such a thing unless they live in the bigger cities). I did the usual female character hating for being in the same breathing space as the male characters and called other people homophobic for not liking it, but otherwise stayed away from any major arguments because I don't like being the center of attention. I think my one saving grace that prevented me from turning into something worse than I was was the fact I clung obsessively to LiveJournal (while most others migrated to Tumblr) and I never once considered gay ships to be a political statement of any kind, I really only used them to get my jollies off.

By the time I did get to Tumblr was when I saw first hand how the whole shipping culture changed drastically and I was already old enough to see that these people were full of crap. Yaoi ships started making one of the guys trans (because gay people weren't progressive enough), gays were dropped in favor of lesbians (intially because fetishizing gay people was wrong and later because men are icky and gross), people literally writing lenghty essays on how shipping was their way of being an "ally" to the LGBT community, queer coding and oh so much more I could think of. Everything became highly politicized and a thinly veiled excuse to crap on men. It was around that time along with the many cries of "all white people are evil racist colonizers" that I started to drift away completely.

It also helped that I'm not American and Tumblr is almost offensively americentric. For all they complain about cultural appropriation and respecting other cultures, they literally cannot see past America and think the entire world is like this. I'm Slavic, so that kind of crap will never fly with me.

Nowadays I just keep to myself most of the time.

 

[Emperor Julian]

It also helped that I'm not American and Tumblr is almost offensively americentric. For all they complain about cultural appropriation and respecting other cultures, they literally cannot see past America and think the entire world is like this. I'm Slavic, so that kind of crap will never fly with me.

Nowadays I just keep to myself most of the time.

One of the easiest ways to spot an sjw is how likely they are to demand other cultures ascribe to or ape American values or culture. This bizzarely includes the british ones.

 

[AnOminous]

One of the easiest ways to spot an sjw is how likely they are to demand other cultures ascribe to or ape American values or culture. This bizzarely includes the british ones.

They're really too ignorant of the world to realize how offensive and literally culturally imperialistic that is.

 

[cancelled]

Ex-SJW here. Spent some time as a teen on Tumblr and absolutely hated it. I've always been more into 4chan, Reddit, etc. culture. I still hold leftist political views to some extent but what really got me was how fucking hypocritical and self obsessed sjws are. They're such idiots that trolling them is a blast. Their form of liberalism/social justice crap is nothing but attention whoring bull.

 

[Aquinas]

i mean, it doesnt sound like you were an SJW at all

 

[doodoocaca]

I got sucked into the SJWshit the nerdy way - what I was told about how communism was wrong was literally "it's evil." Being a nerdy teenager, I realized "nobody wants to be evil" and started looking into it. What they tell themselves, what communism looks like on paper, is not the worst thing in the world. The issue is how to get there from here, and teenagers don't really grasp things like practicality or "brainwashing and torture is bad and will happen if they get too uppity". So, simple curiosity stemming from facile educations set me down that path. I really think we need better education about what's wrong with communism and communists, not just "it is bad because I say so."

Other than the usual bromides about your boss needs you, you don't need your boss, blah blah workers I wasn't really different, since SJWs as we know and complain about them weren't a thing yet, at least to me. I started seeing them around the time I got drug into something awful in 07 or 08 - specifically, the Laissez's Faire subforum, which was fully pozzed by then.

I started buying the shit, frog in warm water style, but started realizing things were amiss when poor people had to check their white privilege, but a rich black person didn't have to check their bank statement. I was poor as shit at the time and that kind of stung - there's other personal shit, too, but I've also learned what happens if you share weaknesses with them, and one of them might remember me. I still found myself carefully picking words and policing my THINKING around this time, but I did think bullshit was bullshit, if only because I had internalized "workers are oppressed" before they started saying the original sin of pale skin and a dick overwrote that. I still regret spreading this bullshit to my friends.

2014 is when I got gut-punched by fate, and found out these lefties I thought were my friends got their fangs and claws out, hoping to totally break me and make me a perfect little 'ally'. Thankfully I snapped out of it instead of starting to grovel at people using my own bullshit as a stepping stone to status on the progressive stack, who basically said "whatever you suffered we did more so, check your privilege."

Watching these fuckstains over play their hands and run out of breath has been a fucking relief, but undoing the cultural damage they've committed is going to be fucking hard. At least Trump has been fucking hilarious to watch. It sucks that it took losing fucking everything and realizing I was just as useful idiot to snap out of it, but at least I can share this with others.

I sometimes reflect on if I bought into the gender bullshit and ended up as broken as them, chasing ideals that don't exist, or fighting phantoms of 'gender performance' that are only in their heads. I've seen friends 'come out' as agender and become fucking miserable. What the fuck? At least at the start this was coming from a desire to make the world better. Instead it just proves "the road to hell is paved in good intentions" and watching people who at least seemed to be altruistic turn into resentful monsters is fucking chilling.

Whatever. Trump is the fucking president and people argue with East Europeans on the internet about communism. We're in a clown world.

 

[AF 802]

I've reconsidered a few times since I've been here, not gonna lie. Since being active in politics seems to be a requirement in modern society, and being on the anti-SJW side caused distress and further discourse with my family, I thought about turning back and regressing to my old ways. Then I realized you can be for people to be treated fairly but be against the stupid in the rights movement. If you're trans, Muslim, enby, black, Jewish, whatever, I don't look at that. Just don't act retarded around me and we're good. Of course, everything's a Jewish Soros conspiracy according to quite a many on that side, so what do I know?

If you believe being for diversity and rights is a Zionist conspiracy funded by Soros, you're likely a mixed-race individual with a BMI higher than 40 who goes onto /pol/ and brags about your near-majority European ancestry.

 

[JambledUpWords]

I was never an SJW, but I did call myself a feminist during middle school and high school. My main reasoning behind it was that I thought there was a wage gap. I wasn’t rabid or anything about being a feminist, but I called myself one most likely due to my own ignorance of politics. Once I discovered the wage gap was completely false and has been taken care of for decades in the US, I felt lied to. This was around 2011-2012. Afterwards, I couldn’t associate with feminism. My mom is a feminist and does believe in a wage gap. This caused a bit of a rift between us, so I purposely try to avoid the subject around her.

Aside from that, I did have a phase where I was obsessed with finding SJW stuff in things. Luckily it died down and I haven’t become a lolcow from it. That being said, I’m tired of intersectional feminism, Islam apologism and lgbt stuff invading education. I’m in college right now, so I come across it every so often. It gets annoying because I feel like I can’t express my opinion in class about those things,while other people can, since it might hurt my academic standing in my university.

Luckily, Kiwi Farms allows me to express my opinions, no matter how weird or autistic they are

 

[This+]

I consider myself pretty left-leaning so I don't think I could say I "left," but what I observe from the lefty/SJW sphere of the internet is that if you fuck up even once, you're crucified for it and nothing you do can change it. There's also the "temporary" friendships until it turns out X is a TERF so she's out; and then Y's shitty edgy twitter meme from 2 years ago was uncovered, so he's out; and before you know it they're fragmented and easy pickings for the drama channels.

The constant eating each other is probably one of the key reasons why the alt-right/anti-SJW movement grew quickly because they are at the very least more united than the left, though you now start to see that happening with them as well.

 

[MadDamon]

Really sorry for the hell many of you have gone through.
If it's possible I want to give each one of you a hug.

 

[DOGFARM]

Used to be extremist leftist and hated republicans CUZ I WAHSNT LIEK DA OTHER GURLS. It's common nowadays confused teens will be confused teens

 

[DOGFARM]

but arent most girls in america rather liberal and anti-republican to begin with?

I'm sure it's a lot worse in (((canada))) but I grew up in a particularly republican majority state in the US. Most girls were NPC at best, they just don't talk about it. A lot better than feminists that sit behind me and yell in my ear though. Maybe it's the plague...

 

[Manah]

I consider myself pretty left-leaning so I don't think I could say I "left," but what I observe from the lefty/SJW sphere of the internet is that if you fuck up even once, you're crucified for it and nothing you do can change it. There's also the "temporary" friendships until it turns out X is a TERF so she's out; and then Y's shitty edgy twitter meme from 2 years ago was uncovered, so he's out; and before you know it they're fragmented and easy pickings for the drama channels.

The constant eating each other is probably one of the key reasons why the alt-right/anti-SJW movement grew quickly because they are at the very least more united than the left, though you now start to see that happening with them as well.

I'm pretty much the same. I'd consider myself solidly on the left, but when I started reading sites like Kiwi Farms where people had different viewpoints than me, I actually had to move out and examine my views a bit.

For example, I don't really take an issue with trans people innately. Their bodies, whatever. Don't care. But at the same time, I find the idea of things like feeding your kid horomone blockers just in case they decide they're trans to be kind of horrifying, and I don't think "being trans" should be a shield against mockery for ugly-ass hambeasts with neckbeards just because they put on a dress.

Also I've come to pay more attention to a lot of the double standards people hold. Violence against peaceful protesters who agree with me? Reprehensible. Violence against peaceful protesters who don't agree with me? SEND IN THE TANKS.

Double standards aren't an SJW exclusive issue, but I try to hold myself to a higher standard than that, at the very least.