I've been thinking about your third bullet point a lot lately. I genuinely think that the lack of irl social interaction these days is far more pernicious than anyone wants to acknowledge. I don't think it's social media and technology that are the problem, rather, the LACK of third places and irl social interaction is the problem, if that makes sense.

Exactly. I suspect whenever I talk about the reality of the USSR or other AES she just tunes it out because I was born after the cold war ended, though. I'll keep trying.

Right, it's not about evidence.

It probably is some kind of bigotry. Racism (the myth of the welfare queen), ableism (the myth that people en masse lie about being disabled to get benefits), protestant work ethic, etc. No clue how to combat those things, though, other than explaining how these myths came to be, which I have. I'm just at a loss and would like to have at least one family member who isn't a total reactionary POS.

You're right, there are easier people out there. Problem is that I don't have much of a social life irl, partially by choice, and partially due to being autistic. I have tried to explain unions and their benefits to her once before, and she just came at me with "UnIoN dUeS bAd."

The thing is that she's from WV and her dad was a coal miner for a union mine that had showers for the miners to use at the end of the workday. She's told me a story about how in the 80s, the union went on strike, and her dad went to work for the scab mine with no showers and how heartbreaking it was to see him come home covered in coal dust. Again, it's like the elevator just doesn't go all the way up. She has the pieces but refuses to put them together. Part of me thinks she's just a lost cause.

Right. I think I've sort of gestured towards that, but may not have explained it fully to her. I'll go more in-depth next time I get the chance to have this type of conversation with her.

My intent isn't to defend social democracy or the capitalist welfare state...I believe my post may not have fully gotten that across, sorry. The myth of people living it up on various benefits and them being easy to get is what dissuades her from going any further left. One root of that idea is that "lazy" people deserve to suffer, but goodness knows there are several more.

I'm just at a loss for what to do. I can be more open with her than my dad and she does have some decent social beliefs (such as that gay and trans people aren't freaks of nature that are doomed to burn in hell. very low bar, right?), which is what makes this all the more frustrating.

I'm sure that in her mind she chalks it up to her (an honest, hardworking American™) being persecuted by dems who hate big business (if only that were true!). She's only ever worked factory jobs and retail, and I've tried to explain deindustrialization to her, and it's like she agrees but as soon as I quit talking she goes back to "handouts bad. jobs good. work ethic good. complaining bad. millenials and gen z bad. gen x and boomers good." Etc.

Thanks for your response. This is just a supremely frustrating situation all around.

I'll go in order.

1. Don't know enough to comment on.

2. Don't know enough to comment on.

3. I have a healthy skepticism of this idea. I have a friend who very strongly believes the Fort Detrick theory on Covid's origins to be real, and he's almost convinced me. It's more likely than the Wuhan Lab theory, though that's a very low bar, to be fair. People were making the same claim about Monkeypox this past summer, even though there's been an ongoing outbreak in Africa, especially Nigeria (iirc), since 2017, which is where patient 0 of last summer's outbreak had recently traveled to. It's a small world, never doubt that.

4. I don't doubt that ventilators are difficult to operate, and that many people who were put on them died. But a medical intervention/treatment doesn't have to be effective for the vast majority to be effective for some -- and therefore a worthwhile investment. The medical industry in the U.S. has been privatized to hell and is therefore driven by profits. But people working in the medical field are by and large decent people who want to help their fellow humans.

5. Highly, highly doubt.

6. Highly doubt as well.

7. Unfortunately, VERS is known to be infested with anti-vaxx shitheads falsely claiming bad side effects. It is not a reliable source.

8. Total nonsense.

9. Highly doubt. The way I understand it is that because it's more common to encounter Covid than, idk, tetanus, it's necessary to get boosters more often.

10. This a known, albeit rare, side effect that occurs within a pretty short time frame of having gotten the vaccine -- about 2 weeks, iirc.

I think it's a good idea to bear in mind that just because something or someone calls themselves a Marxist doesn't mean they're based, intelligent, or have good takes. Nazbols exist, after all.

It'll likely never come to pass, but my choice would be either China or Cuba.

Thank you, comrade!

Thank you! I'll check out that list.

I am absolutely fascinated with the cultural response to this show...I've never seen it but I'm tempted to watch it for curiosity's sake, though what I already know about it I don't like very much.

There seems to be a lot of casual misogyny in the show (Eleven, Max, and Joyce mostly existing to be shipped). A few years ago I watched a Pop Culture Detective YouTube video about the trope where a boy/man stalks a girl/woman he likes until she caves. Apparently that trope is in Stranger Things, with a black boy stalking a white girl. So there's a racist element to that, too.

Another thing I can't stand in media is when it's set in a certain era, yet doesn't seem to say anything about that era. Why is Stranger Things set in the 80s? As best as I can tell, it's because the directors are nostalgic for their childhoods. I feel like this show is also the prefect example of how nostalgia is often incidentally or explicitly a tool for fascism. Like, they have to put ~Cold War~ stuff in there and be relentlessly anti-communist. Why? Because the 80s were like that! And people are like "it's just accurate to the time!" Maybe so, but why choose to include this specifically? There are also people using this excuse to be rather homophobic, claiming that gay people didn't exist in the 80s, or weren't as common. AIDs pandemic aside, this also proves how nostalgia is a tool for fascism. The general public has very warped views of what certain time periods were like, and it's not totally due to ignorance on their part, it's because an agenda has been pushed, typically by the far right. Also apparently the two gay characters in the show (one canon and the other heavily implied) were treated like garbage in the most recent season. So there's that!

Eleven is the only character in the show who really interests me, since she seems cut from the same cloth as characters like Rei Ayanami, Anthy Himemiya, Crona Gorgon, etc. which I am an absolute sucker for (in case my pfp didn't make it obvious). But I genuinely cannot do high school romance (with one exception...Revolutionary Girl Utena my beloved...and that show is less about romance and more about cycles of abuse and how these fairy tale ideas of romance perpetuate them), especially when the narrative makes it seem like the be-all-end-all. Like, isn't Eleven a girl who escaped from a lab where she was being tortured and experimented on? I feel like with that premise there's so much to explore with this character and yet they shoved her into a relationship and made that her main deal, as best as I can tell. Like, when I was in high school I had a massive crush on one of my closest friends but now that I'm several years out of high school I can't believe that actually happened. It seems so, well, juvenile. Every few weeks I remember the whole ordeal and I'm like "was that real?" Lol.

Sorry for writing a novel...I guess I just needed a place to collect my thoughts about this show.

Do you have any other works to recommend? I have a PDF of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa downloaded that I plan to start on in the next week or so.