Ask Lemmy

Animals don't suffer when we are cruel and violent to them. They don't have the capacity, they're just robots.

There are only five vowels

There's a God, and he loves you.

"I will love you no matter what"

That changed real fuckin fast when i came out as trans

"You'll become more conservative as you get older."

I have consistently grown more and more leftist as I've grown older. Rent goes up faster than taxes. [redacted] your landlord.

I was little and going through that "ask an unending stream of questions to figure out how the world works / determine the limits of your parent's patience" phase. At one point during this my mother, who had up until this point used this as an opportunity to teach me how to research things and overall handled it with grace, began to hit her limit. And so one fine morning when I had perkily jammed myself underneath the toilet in a way that startled the living daylights out of her when she came in and I asked how toilets worked, she said in great exasperation "toilet gnomes, and you shouldn't be down there bothering them". This of course made perfect sense to me - someone had to crew the little boat, and humans would never fit in there.

I maintain to this day that it was an act of class solidarity that I shouldn't be mocked for when, several days later, she found me pooping in the yard because I "didn't want the gnomes to work too hard".

"Penguins are mammals" said to me as an offhand comment by a friend's older brother. I didn't question it till embarrassingly late in life.

"It's ok we (white people) took the land from the Indians because we make better use of it, and can sustain a much larger population on it." Said by my teacher to the third grade class.

"You'll become more conservative as you get older" heard this one quite a bit from people who didn't wanna face facts about the world.

"Global warming is a myth" oh if only that were true. We're so fucked

See first answer. Seriously, they're obviously birds!

Trade schools are for those who couldn't make it into college.

I would have absolutely gone into welding if I had been told the honest truth about what the trades can earn.

Hard work will always lead to success, which is why anyone can be president.

Some really solid teachers in high school were able to cover why that was bullshit just by proper framing of the material.

We were learning Roman numerals in elementary school and the teacher made us work out the current year.

I was the first one to correctly work out "MCMXCVIII" only to be quite smugly told by the teacher that you can just do "IIMM". It took more than a decade until I learned that he was full of shit and my answer was the only correct one.

Not a lie in that I think this was the truth for them (because me and my siblings are awesome), but: "having kids is amazing."

Mine are teenagers and I feel horrible saying it but it's still hard for me to be a parent the same way my parents were. I'm not nearly as patient. I don't think I've slept well for over a decade. My sex life with my partner is non-existent for quite a while. I feel like all I do is work, serve, and sleep.

Maybe it'll get better. I'm not having a good time, though. Neither are neurotypical. I don't know if I am either, the more I read about it. Poooooo

"When you grow up, you can be anything you want to be."

I wanna be a homeowner. 🫩

I grew up with a conservative father who regularly listened to Rush Limbaugh (may he never rest at all). So yeah. All of.... That.

Oddly enough I took a lot of the lies to heart. Like how the government should stay out of people's private lives, like what/how they worship and who they love, which was my gateway out of that kind of thinking. Went to college, traveled abroad, and now I'm just about as radically far left as you can get without circling back around.

With liberty and and justice for all.

My parents told me they put our cat up for adoption (it was a feral cat that only liked me) after I left home for university. My brother later accidentally let it slip they had the cat put down. I’ve never really forgiven them for that.

"You're just having a brother fight. You and your brother are going to grow up to be best friends."

No, my autistic brother with FASD who was my rapist, and is a kleptomaniac, sociopath, pathological liar, and borderline pedophile... will never be my friend in adulthood.

1. there is a god

2. race is a biological reality

3. men and women are fundamentally different

4. Just world theory

5. America is a force for good in the world

6. The Enlightenment makes Western culture superior

7. The post-war boom where a single income could buy a hose/ car/ and college was a universal reality and not exclusive to white men.

8. Guns make you safe.

Roundup is safe

BC stands for before Christ (I guess some people still say this but I think its more religious people that do)

Democrats are evil

Humans can't destroy earth because god made that imposisble

Seeing a pattern ?

So many.

But also a lot of truths I had to learn the hard way (and being ASD exacerbated this).

Crime does pay. Especially if you’re rich. (Wish: no it should not fucking pay)

No. You don’t have to share. Nobody makes an adult share their car with some rando who shows up to the family bbq like we make kids share their toys with some kid showing up. (No, don’t compare this to taxes, that’s shallow and devoid of nuance)

IMO people are not inherently good. They’re not inherently bad, either. They are often shortsighted, apathetic, and self-serving.

I wish that all the fictional lovely futures we’d imagined when I was a kid were real. Clean cities. Flying cars. Clean power. Space stations. Amazing medical care. The ability for everyone to choose a nice life and what to do with it. We’re getting the opposite.

Worst lie currently: “checks and balances in the US government keep anyone from getting too much control.”

There are a lot more. They’re easier to remember when confronted with them.

My mom told me the crust was the part of the bread with the most nutrients.

• It's illegal to turn the interior light on in the car while driving.
• If you make that face, it'll stay like that.
• Sitting too close to the TV will give you square eyes
• If you lie, you get spots on your tongue (would then ask to show you your tongue when they asked you if you telling the truth)
• The Square box in that corner (the maximize window button on a PC) is a camera and we can watch what you do.

The only way to get somewhere in this life is to get a business college degree.

Burger flippers are worthless.

Trash collectors make terrible pay for dirty work conditions.

I love you.

Teachers' ramblings in Turkey and Texas.

• Gokturk Khaganate was NOT "the biggest empire in history."
• Ottoman empire did NOT essentially rule the world.
• Genies aren't gonna bully me if I don't memorize my Surahs.
• World is not 6000 years old, and there weren't giant humans everywhere.
• North Korea did not kill more people than all ideologies "including Nazis" combined.

(Also uncountably many from my weird matt walsh phase in highschool)

"You won't always have a calculator in your pocket."

Out of all the wrong things I was taught in school... A calculator is probably the least complex thing I have in my pocket at all times.

However, understanding basic math, up to algebra and trigonometry is extremely useful on a daily, if not at least weekly basis.

You have to have a college degree or you will be poor and struggling your whole life.

My health class was taught by our gym teacher and she was terrible at it. Some points I remembered being taught:

• Hypertension is when the hamstrings of your legs shrink because you don't stretch every morning. Hypertension can kill you, so make sure you stretch.
• All drugs make you hallucinate. Every single one of them. Usually dragons. People die on drugs because they're trying to get away from the dragons and jump off buildings or run into traffic.
• Babies have super suction power which they use to breastfeed. An adult cannot get milk from a breast because they can't suck hard enough.

I learned these were wrong after starting secondary school where biology was taught by someone who studied biology. Except for the breastfeeding thing. That one was through personal research.

That if I walked into a lab and didn't leave when asked I'd get a job

We are the good guys.

When my dad didn't know better when I was a little kid, I told him how curious I was to try soy milk after seeing it in a kids' show

He told me to never drink it because then I'll start growing boobs

I still don’t have square eyes even though I was sitting in front of screens my whole life.

Also “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger“ is really bad advice.

Oh boy, where do I start? I was raised by racist crack and meth addicts in the rural southern US.

Black people hate white people.

Black people are trying to replace white people on a genetic level (Great Replacement Theory).

Black people have smaller skulls and thus, smaller brains than white people, which makes them more ape-like and prone to aggression.

Black people are taller, run faster, and jump higher than white people because they have three extra muscles in their knee area. Basketball was a white people's sport before they set the slaves free.

Black people drink and play loud music all the time because "that's their culture".

All black people are lazy moochers who cheat the welfare system for free money to drink and smoke crack all day because they feel entitled to it after slavery.

Black people actually liked slavery back in the day because they had a decent, simple life. Many of them begged to go back to the plantations after they were freed because they had nowhere else to go.

The world was a better place when black people were slaves because at least then, they worked. Now, you have them all sitting around, collecting welfare, having white people pay their bills for them. If you think about it, white people are the slaves now.

Just a little crack is fine, as long as you're not an addict like those black people.

Beer is for white people. It doesn't get you too drunk so you can still go to work. Black people don't work, that's why they drink liquor.

Birds have wings because they're supposed to fly, that's what they do. Women have wombs because they're supposed to have babies, that's what they do.

Men are supposed to have as many babies as possible because God says to be fruitful and multiply. But women are only supposed to have their husband's babies to keep the bloodline pure.

I'm sure there are more, those are just the ones I haven't repressed.

1. Cigarette butts aren't litter
2. You're supposed to leave all your garbage in your seat at the movie theatre.

The classic "if you eat watermelon seeds, one will grow in your stomach."

"If you put some blu-tak on the top of the SNES version of Mortal Kombat, it will think it's the Mega Drive version and put the blood back in."

Even young me knew this one was weapons-grade bollocks, but it didn't stop kids at school excitedly trying it.

my father said you are gay if you don't like sports and you read books.