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?

  • 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."