Your political opinions are disjointed; the positions you hold in no way line up with the labels you apply to yourself. When you talk about politics, it sounds like someone live-tweeting the writer's room at Last Week Tonight on a particularly unproductive day.
Your every thought was spoon-fed to you by a group of propagandists who want you dead. Every conversation we have feels to me like digging through a pile of excrement looking to find out what a sick animal had for its last meal. That's how distasteful it is, finding the regurgitated chunks of headline you half-understood, and how easy it is to identify the corny chunks of Sam Bee tweets and blood-red WaPo opinion column titles.
When you asked me to read a technical manual and summarize it for you, I empathized with your learning disorder and helped you out - don't you goddamn dare claim what little you've read of contemporary politics or current events is even on the same plane of validity as my own. When you patronizingly say "No one is entitled to their own facts", I agree, but you mean the ones you were given rather than than the Truth. You imagine yourself a free-thinker, a scientist, and the truth is you question nothing and do not think at all.
I know you're trying to justify your position in the company during layoff season, but I have half a mind to make your job look unnecessary instead of helping you prove how necessary it is, even knowing it will make my own long days even longer.
I doubt I'm the only one who ends a day at work feeling like this. If you read it, thanks for listening to me vent.
The way I do it at my workplace is I try to sow some doubt into someone's psyche. If they parrot a mainstream "fact", I go "Hey, but did you know actually it was this or that" - and because people at my workplace aren't reddit retards, they'll go "You don't say? Really?"
Basically I push centrist/right wing talking points but I kinda just lightly shove it into their faces. Like when they were talking about the stimulus I asked them where the money was coming from. They go "They're printing/making it", and then I point out Venezuela, which makes them pause. I then roll it back by going "Of course we're not at that point, but you can kinda see why constantly printing money out of thin air is going to screw us over in the long run right? Is this really the way to go?"
If my coworker has a brain it makes them think. The problem is, most are too fucking blue pilled TO think. I have ONE coworker that knows I'm right wing and an ex-Dem. That's it.
They're frickin' demons, man!
Literal pot-bellied goblin vampires.
how dangerous is that co-worker?
Good question. He's very... passive about things. He has strong opinions but he doesn't shove his opinions down your throat. He's not a raving lunatic and actually listened to me bitch about the MSM, if that tells you anything.
One big one, is that the military budget is 60%+ of the federal budget. Everyone "knows" that that's true. Problem is, it isn't true. In fact it's roughly the inverse, with healthcare and social security making up around 60% of the federal budget.
The military is part of the "voluntary" budget, but that's less than half the overall budget - the entitlement programs make up the "mandatory" half the budget, the one nobody argues over.
Yup. But it's super disingenuous and misleading to try to convince people that military spending is around 60% of "the federal budget," or try to lead them to that conclusion. And that is what they're trying to do. So many people think we spend more than half the total budget on the military, and almost nothing on healthcare and social security, and such programs.
I did stuff like that too. I would mostly say things like "Oh I that true? I thought I read something different once. Maybe I'm wrong though, it was a long time ago." And I had no problem admitting I was wrong about stuff, which I did occasionally misremember.
Mostly the point was to get people to question the stuff they were parroting from John Oliver or whoever. A lot of the time I think people just repeat that stuff because they don't have anything else to talk about or want to sound smart. It becomes some sort of charade where people are just high-fiving each other over how well they can recall the latest propaganda.