My mind keeps thinking back to a brief exchange I had with my mother about a year ago. It was sometime in the late fall/early winter of 2020 and my mom was watching some local news channel that was showing a segment on the state of pre trial detention in the U.S., and my mom turned to me and said something along the lines of "That's terrible! Did you know that some people are spending over a year in jails just waiting for their trial?"

(I don't remember the exact words said in this exchange but I remember the jist of it)

"Mom, you know I spent the entire summer yelling at cops. What makes you think that I didn't know about the terrible things they do?"

"Well, this doesn't have to do with cops because this is just the justice system not taking care of these people's cases fast enough"

Now normally I try and educate my mother about the bullshit in the world but that answer was so blatantly intentionally ignorant that I was just fucking speechless. It took me a couple seconds of complete bewilderment before I could ask the very, very obvious follow up question of "WHO DO YOU THINK PUTS PEOPLE IN JAIL???"

At that point my mom just threw up her hands and just gave up. I'm pretty sure she even realized that what she said was completely absurd. But I keep going back to this exchange in my head because it's such an eye opening view into the liberal mind

Anyone else have any good stories like that?

  • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    From a lib close to me: The Soviet Union was so unpopular in Ukraine that "the Ukrainians" sided with the nazis when they invaded.

    I had the presence of mind to ask if it was a particular class of Ukrainians that did this collaborating. Anyway, yeah it was my dad, who's married to a Jew (my mom) descended from Ukranian Jews. He's also known for about 35 years a Jewish couple that survived the holocaust in Ukraine. My mom and I have an unknown number of ancestors (definitely >0) that were killed in antisemitic violence in Ukraine.

    Unfortunately, he's been marinating in red scarce absurdities since the 50s. Any sort of class analysis is definitely not going to happen. In general, If he didn't see it in the NYT then it ain't true, even if I'm telling him about something I've seen with my own eyes.

      • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        That may be true, but you won't hear it on the history channel or in an interview with Anne Applebaum in the NYT unless there's also an insinuation that something sinister was going on. Therefore, it isn't actually true. It could never be that people wanted to stop ethnic violence that helped the rich and get back to the business of building universal prosperity and security. It could never be something so simple and relatable.

        The unspecified evil is always more plausible than just considering what a human might actually do. I suppose that's racism doing its work. It'll happen to when my dad is educating me on Venezuela, or Cuba, or the DPRK. I'll point out that everything he said is objectively false, but also implausible because it's things no one would ever have any reason to do, and he'll just say "yeah, well I'm sure (place) is pretty bad."

    • corgiwithalaptop [any, love/loves]
      ·
      3 years ago

      My dad is in his 70s and has a PHD in philosophy. He's trying to start a dialog with me about being a Marxist. He pointed to modern russia as an example of "communism failing," which anyone with even a basic interest in leftism can see is just not a good take, but im debating just how much I want to engage him on it. He's generally super reasonable about being presented with new ideas, but like...im probably not gonna change any minds here, with him being raised with McCarthyism being like the national default position.

      That said, he was recently diagnosed with low grade dementia, so I might try to engage him just on the basis of "this has been the most lucid and coherent that he's talked about anything to me in a number of years."