Verum: Doing The Right Thing

Read the thread. Sorry for disappointment of a community that welcomed me ;(
For other things I've apologized ~ 2 years ago before the full-scale russian invasion and don't have anything to add.

 

We all understand how the invasion has affected Ukraine. This post would have been more effective if you just left it at the first sentence.

 

I've only explained that apology was posted before the invasion and it was not playing a "i'm from Ukraine" card.
That's all I wanted to say.

 

I like to think that I come across as a reasonably nice, if often highly opinionated, person.

Having said that, it may come as something of a surprise to many that've met me in recent years (if I haven't hinted at this in How to Win Friends threads often enough) that I used to be racist and extremely colourist (there is a difference between these things) and am still having to mentally kick myself more often than I'd like to admit. People cannot just change without a lot of consistent effort and mindfulness.

The Philippines is rife with that sort of thing, which is why it makes sense to me that, if you've never had the opportunity to expand your horizons beyond the scope of your place of birth or heritage, it's really frickin easy to fall into bigotry and clannishness. I cannot speak from personal experience with respect to other countries, but based on what friends I have that've travelled elsewhere have shared, Japan and Korea, for example, can be remarkably xenophobic, often more overtly so than the Philippines can be; that doesn't mean these people are all bad, just that they often haven't been afforded the chance to expand their perspectives beyond what living in a mostly ethnically and culturally homogenous space is like.

The stuff Garuspik said before was really f'ing stupid and I'd have kicked him in the balls if he said any of that to me or anyone I cared about in person. But again, people can grow with a lot of effort and mental self-checking-- or so I'd like to believe, anyway, because I have a personal investment in that being the case.

That doesn't mean he's owed forgiveness from anyone he's personally offended-- if anyone wants to keep shitting on him then that's fine, that each person's prerogative, but if there's one aspect of the current Western netspace that I find personally annoying it's that there's no more nuance to conversation, or allowance for kindness. I see nothing wrong with shitting on people who remain deplorable, but whether or not they remain the case will be anyone's guess.

Two years isn't enough time to change in a meaningful way when it comes to stuff like this, but it can be a start.

 

Wishing cancer on people has nothing to do with homogeneous surroundings. It's also not a case of "I didn't know, I wasn't educated, I didn't have experience".

 

I agree, but that falls under "being a shitty person at one point doesn't mean they're doomed to be one for the rest of their lives", and "two years is nowhere near enough time to make a meaningful change, but it's a start". And again, I would have reacted with violence if anyone had the audacity to say the same to my face and mean it.

EDIT: I'd like to partially amend the above. It has nothing to do with growing up in a societally dearth of diversity, but it does possibly speak to the circumstances of one's birth and upbringing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but people generally aren't born hateful and vitriolic which, make no mistake, those furtive messages that were later brought to light were.