The summer before covid I was in a public park campaigning for Bernie. The vast majority of interactions we had were positive. Anyway, some chunky white Gen Xer came up to me while he was sucking down a vanilla ice cream cone and started ranting about how he was a chemist and climate change was fake. I remembered something Bill Nye said once, and asked this guy why Venus was hotter than Mercury, despite Venus being farther from the sun. (Answer: a shitload of C02 in the atmosphere.) The guy could not answer and soon left. The question clearly bothered him a great deal.
Obviously you have to take my word for all of this. I know it’s also oozing with liberalism, but I mended many of my evil ways the following summer.
Last autumn at a family dinner. That side of my family is the most liberal bunch you’ll ever meet. Nice people, but politically, economically, and historically illiterate - typical Canadian middle class. The topic of Finland’s brave fight against the USSR during the Winter War came up during a Ukraine discussion. So I chimed in to remind them that in WW2, the Finnish government was run by nazis, and fighting against our Soviet allies. A very awkward silence all-around that I thoroughly enjoyed.
There were some posh dickheads at my school who made a podcast. They were runnin their mouths about all sorts. They invited me onto the show to discuss transgender sports.
I don’t fully remember the whole conversation anymore, but the gist is that I brought the facts and they started backing into weirder and weirder corners, until one said that they should’ve kept the royal family of pure blood. I queried if he meant incest or racial purity and he was like umm yes, no, I mean, I don’t know, both, neither…
Whole thing was a shitshow of these two morons getting quite casually shut down. The episode went so horribly that not only did they never release the episode, but they also stopped podcasting.
Until… About a year later. They make an Instagram poll on their story saying ‘there’s some hot topics about, should we make a comeback?!’
If you scrolled far enough back in my accounts history, you’d find the post where I enlisted the hexbear army to all vote no. The votes got so bombed that it was about 90% no and 10% yes. They never did return. I haven’t seen any of them even post anything remotely political online ever since.
I remember once a few years ago I told one of my mom’s lib friends I was a communist after talking to her about recent events for over an hour. She literally froze, mouth agape, at me, for about five seconds - and then started trying to tell me I couldn’t actually be a commie because Trump was the most communist candidate and I had been bashing on him. Further proof that for a lot of American normies “communism” and “dictatorship” are basically synonyms.
I forcibly read the Cornerstone Speech to one of my parents
They forgot about it within weeks though. Genuinely said they didn’t remember when I asked
I sometimes wonder about the memory of people who are political, but have all their opinions shift in step with the media. Know an Economist reader type guy who a year ago was balls to the wall warhawk on Ukraine and NATO, regardless of nukes, etc. Now regularly explaining how it would be stupid to push a nuclear power against the wall as if it was always his stance. And if I call him out on it, or other stuff, he gets a ‘dog trying to figure out where his human went’ look. And it’s not just him, i know a lot of people like that. Meanwhile, I’m randomly keeping myself up at night because I misgendered someone 5 years ago.
It’s hard for me to comprehend. I used to think that they were lying out of shame, but I don’t even see a flicker of recognition when I mention something they’ve memory-holed. I’m pretty convinced at this point that a lot of them couldn’t get access to their own memory-holes even if they wanted to try
I’m middle aged now and I really do think that the vast majority of people just have shit memory. Whether or not that’s due to the stress of Capitalism or human limits, idk. But, I’ve noticed that over the years I remember a lot of details that people find unsettling and i’ve heard almost all my friends’ stories multiple times and they will happily tell them as if we’ve just met. Some of them I was there for.😅
that owns, I’m remembering that one
Nowadays that kinda person would insist that there’s no proof that Venus is that hot because “NASA tampered with the numbers” or would just straight up say that Venus is fake
