You mean, The Truman Show was actually art imitating life?
And the funny not funny thing is that before the ACA, pre-existing conditions essentially deprived one of any choice.
Then again, we still have the greatest healthcare system for a neoliberal economy where the carriers’ wealth is far more important than allowing access to affordable healthcare.
Of course, Trump is now promising that if reelected, he’ll provide us with the superior replacement to the ACA that he originally promised in 2016 and that inexplicably his party refused to make possible when they controlled both houses of Congress in 2017 and 2018.
For a lot of people, what matters is persuading others, not being right. Winning a debate just means your opponent rolled over, or you got the loudest applause. In those terms, self-criticism, open-mindedness and thinking are all liabilities; conversely, you have a massive advantage if you don’t rule out logical fallacies and/or simple lying.
If that’s how you roll, you’ll adopt an argument you know to be wrong, so long as you can use it to beat someone else later. It’s exactly like multi-level marketing, only with status instead of money: you let someone con you today, in return for the promise of conning five people tomorrow and getting to pose as the alpha-dog politics expert in your office.
Sure, being systematically wrong on purpose has its downsides. If you’re dying of thirst, and someone tells you the oasis is the other way, it’s not worth arguing just to preserve your status. But usually the downside isn’t that direct. And some people care a lot about status. (related)
Anyway the point is, the forces of evil don’t need a mind-control ray. They just need to put the right kind of catchily-wrong argument out there, and about half the population will eagerly do the work for them.
For my money, the best tactic might be to just let this happen, but try to find a way to talk about “voting for the right thing, even when you spend your life knowingly arguing for the wrong thing”. I mean, Fox viewers know their talking points are horseshit, they just need a face-saving way to decouple that from how they behave in the secrecy of a voting booth.
For what it’s worth, we who work in the trenches are very much aware of the direction we need to be headed. (Its not really worth much, just fyi)
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