User:Woozle/LwaC

Lunch with a Conservative

These are posts made in frustration about trying to have rational dialogue with my dad over lunch, which we were having more or less every week (at his request) over the course of more than a decade.

January through October 2016 were originally public; the rest were originally private in order to avoid confrontation. In July 2017, I decided I was done with that.

Note that I never identified him in any of the original public posts; I might have referred to him as "a relative" in comments on occasion. Even now I'm not giving his name. I could just link to Wikipedia, but that would be equivalent.

Prequel

Over the years before this, he had forwarded me many irritatingly counterfactual articles "for your amusement"; I wrote responses to some of them. Here's one:

• 2010-01-30 Twelve Simple Ways to Fight This Climate Change/woozle

2014

• /2014-01-29 : an introduction of sorts to the haute right-wingiverse
• /2014-02-01 (mainly link to a denialist article he sent me)
• /2014-02-18 : Obama is arrogant and refused to negotiate during the "fiscal cliff" crisis; the Israelis are so much more civilized than those barbarous Palestinians
• /2014-04-08 : employees ousting a CEO because of his beliefs is "fascism"
• /2014-04-15 (you can skip this one too; very short)
• /2014-05-29 : liberals are against free speech
• /2014-05-30 : many claims
• /2014-10-21 : Democrats are exactly as much in the pockets of the big corporations as the Republicans are; book idea
• /2014-10-22 : he recognizes himself in my LwaC posts, and wants me to remove all of them (so much for freeze peach); this and subsequent posts are private
• /2014-11-16 : I've avoided meeting with him for awhile; here, he agrees that I can arbitrarily rule subjects off-limits, and I agree to resume lunches

2015

• /2015-04-01 : a re-introduction for MKaTS; some climate change questions
• /2015-04-03 : climate change responses
• /2015-05-19 : global warming denial, probabilities, Pascal's wager, and the Taleb+4 statement
• /2015-09-22 : a possible insight into the dysconservative mind (long)

2016

• /2016-03-10 : a possible insight into the Republican votership; "science by consensus"
• /2016-03-24 : me: Trump is the logical endpoint of Republican counterfactualism; him: "both sides are out of touch with reality"
• /2016-03-25 : more claims from 3/24 - English law and self-defense; austerity counterfactualism
• /2016-04-11 : (very short) are all cultures equally good? Do liberals believe they are?
• /2016-05-12 : [now posting to SWoC] no "transgenders" have ever been attacked in restrooms, because he has never heard of any such thing
• /2016-05-24 : my response to him, about HB2
• /2016-05-26 : his infuriating response to that

Apparently this was where I made the decision (with support from my therapist) to discontinue our lunches.

Life with a Conservative

• 2019-09-14 He emailed me this article (rebuttal), with the comment "Hi W: I don't think you are autistic, and I was unaware of the conflict discussed at the end of this article. But it is an interesting piece and I thought you might find it worth reading." I just want to know where he gets off saying I'm not autistic when I have so many matching symptoms. It's equivalent to saying "I think all your strange and problematic behavior patterns are just for show."