My family are mostly Democrat voting liberals and I identified as one for years. When I was in 5th grade I spent more time with my Fox News-watching grandparents and became a Republican for like a year or 2 and became an apolitical lib for a while. From like 2015-2019 I was a Bernie bro who had some objectively shit takes. The biggest 180 I did was probably on the sex trade. I used to be for it as a horny teen like “huh? Did someone say SeX?? Well it’s all ConSeNsUAL so why cockblock someone from getting some PuSsY?” Obviously now I realize that’s a disgusting sentiment and that most people in the industry are not happy and would rather do anything else. Just because a few are happy with their line of work, it doesn’t make it right to force so many others into a position where they feel abused and humiliated or threatened. “Legitimacy of industry” in terms of prostitution always means lining the pockets of abusive pimps (physical or anything else) who will use the opportunity to get rich and usually fund illegal markets (source: Look at Nevada). Enough about me, what topics have become more clear to yall after becoming a communist? I could probably list a few others but I’m interested in seeing what yall say.
That the Holocaust was an aberration. If anything it was a continuation of what came before.
Maybe this has long been clear to some of you but it's been interesting for me coming to this conclusion. I went to school in Canada, where we of course learned about the settlement and colonization of Canada, but in a "oh this was bad but it was a long time ago and for the most part the white people didn't know any better." It was also always the British or French colonists doing these horrible things, once Canada requested independence a few unimportant treaties may have been broken but all in all everything's fine now. Well except for residential schools, but that was an honest mistake. And except for unbelievably awful living conditions on native reserves, that's their own fault. So goes the state written and approved school curriculum, of course they can't admit to their generations long history of crimes.
Of course the colonists and later the US and Canadian governments knew exactly what they were doing. They killed about a hundred million people on purpose.
Around the same time during high school I took a course that focused on the Holocaust, with material written by a Zionist NGO, basically placing the Holocaust as the pinnacle of crime against humanity to which nothing can compare.
And that's all while ignoring colonial atrocities in the global south, as I've only really started learning about those as a part of my journey into ML.