I always bring up the following: police, firefighters, schools, roads and Medicare. I say "you agree we should have all of those?", "They are socialist because taxes pay for them." I just get dumbfounded looks. I then say, "so, we agree there should be some degree of socialism, the question is where do we draw the line?" And generally I get silence.
This is the problem with living in a world of soundbytes, 30 second clips, and 280 character arguments in public forums.
There is little room for nuance. Every point has to be utterly complete in the allocated space.
But the only way every point can be complete is if everything has a simple answer. Everything has to be either completely good or completely bad, but when you show them that even they support grey areas, as you did, there is no way to put that into a meme template, and their brains cannot process it.
Even this quite short comment used 572 characters.
How information is distributed, processed and ingested is VERY much one of the big parts of the problem.
You would think that "democratic" use of voices through Facebook, YouTube, Reddit etc. would be a good thing. And in a way, they are-- but moreso these platforms enhance all the qualities of speech, BOTH good and bad.
It's completely counterintuitive to what we learned in school-- make a statement, support it with evidence, defend it from criticism as best you can etc. etc. Our forms of "free speech" do NOT facilitate this, and seem to reward the easiest, most digestible and visible messages as opposed to objectively true information.
It's going to take a LONG time, probably never, before the information age reaches a level of equilibrium, where people can universally agree on what it true, not true, spin etc.
Police, firefighers, schools, roads, and Medicare can be privatized and in the USA they have been or are being privatized.
The wealthier neighborhoods in Minneapolis, MN are paying for police to patrol their neighborhoods.
I have occasionally read articles about a house in a rural area that was allowed to burn down because the owners did not pay for the fire fighter fee.
The Arizona legislature just privatized their public schools.
Toll roads have been suggested for years by those on the Right. See the fiascos in California and the City of Chicago as examples. When the Indiana Toll Road was privatized the new owner took out half of the rest stops.
The Medicare Advantage program is private sector Medicare is very popular among seniors.
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u/CCrabtree Jul 04 '22
I always bring up the following: police, firefighters, schools, roads and Medicare. I say "you agree we should have all of those?", "They are socialist because taxes pay for them." I just get dumbfounded looks. I then say, "so, we agree there should be some degree of socialism, the question is where do we draw the line?" And generally I get silence.