I tend to look on people who live in the opposite manner and think, okay, 1000 factors were working against them, and I'm not particularly concerned that they didn't beat the odds as well as another person did. We're going to live in society with all these people no matter what, so it helps everyone if we can make conditions as good as possible, especially for children. Punishing people for their poverty seems like really stupid social policy to me, even if we didn't have much basic compassion for others. Meanwhile, as a society we are very quick to ignore the incessant free-riding that goes on at the top, and the way things are set up to be easier for some people than for others. So I don't care to judge people by how they have fared in this system, but I get that another person who had to scratch their way up from nothing might look upon this in a different way and expect more from other people, and feel more entitled to his own gains.
The person who gave me the argument about immigration is not this guy, but another pretty rational Republican. His position is basically that child detention would be wrong if it were hurting the kids, but he is convinced that we're not hurting the kids and that what we're doing is saving these kids from a much worse fate. There's an awful lot of false dilemma going on in his reasoning, but at least his moral compass is working in some fashion, so I am willing to listen and I think he's persuadable. The problem is there's so much mistrust and misinformation right now - I honestly think most Republicans have become so distrustful of factual information sources that they are lost in the wilderness of their own propaganda. It's not clear how a person like this can be brought to any other view, because they don't believe any of the things you think are true about the situation, and they think all of your sources of information are liars or biased or whatever. This is the scariest thing about the situation, to me, because even if Trump isn't re-elected or there is a change, the fundamental underlying problem isn't going anywhere. A good third of the population is way off the reality rails and I don't know how to get them back.Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Sun Jul 07, 2019 4:06 pm
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