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

    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."