I work with a lib (and yes, the ‘scratch a liberal, etc’ type of lib) and our discussions went some interesting places.

For one, I brought up the shelling of Donbas over the years prior to the war. Now, we’ve discussed the situation regarding folks of Russian background living in Ukraine, folks who’d lived there since the Soviet era and probably even before (I’m not a history buff, but I’m aware folks could easily move around the USSR the same way people can move around the states). Now the guy who likes to diminish the horrors of the US empire post-WW2 as being ‘oh, you mean stuff in the past’ (he’s very good at making sure to set the tone in this manner by the way) now wants to talk about how the last 100 years isn’t a long time period, it’s not really history. He tries to explain it as ‘imagine Mexicans moved in about a hundred years ago’ to try and compare that with Russians living in Donbas, and like…dude, are you about to justify ethnic cleansing? I can’t remember the exact flow of the discussion but thankfully he didn’t expound on that any further.

The very lib approach to language is also a favorite of his; so for example when I tell him that Russia since the start of the war has killed less than 10,000 (EDIT: civilians), rather than discuss it directly (or deny it directly) he instead asks ‘so you believe they killed less than 10,000 (EDIT: civilians)?’, and he does this with everything he doesn’t want to directly deny.

He also makes it sound like this war continuing the way it is, is the only way it can go. I tried explaining that diplomacy would be the better option, but I’m getting the feeling that he wants Ukraine to keep the areas currently held by Russia (and that continued war for it is a good thing), and I really doubt he cares about the killings that had been going on until then.

When discussing countries like China or North Korea, I point out that the news has a history of lying when it comes to discussing the US’ geopolitical rivals, and he argues that just because they lied in the past it doesn’t mean they’ll always lie. Additionally he likes to twist it and say that in this case we can’t trust anyone because anyone can lie. This guy’s only two settings are to basically either trust US news that walks in lockstep with American foreign policy or to claim that no one can be trusted (though I doubt he actually believes the latter). He won’t trust the critics who don’t have a history of lying us into wars, but he’ll trust the ones who have.

He also supports the overthrow of Gaddafi because he says people should be allowed to choose their leaders and that Gaddafi killed/arrested opposition members. It’s over ten years later and Libya was stuck in a civil war until I believe only recently. The guy says he doesn’t like politicians in general, and doesn’t like how corrupt politics are, but he hardly seems to oppose the US’ meddling/warring in foreign countries. It’s always necessary. He supports the US selling weapons to Taiwan for example, despite not recognizing Taiwan as an independent country (which sounds to me like they’re basically just selling the weapons to rebels). Basically if the government decided to start a war with any number of non-Western countries, this guy would find it justified.

When I brought up that CEOs, boards of directors and such at large corporations should absolutely have their jobs taken from them and their companies run by the people who work in these places, he asks why we don’t just lay off corrupt politicians. I explained that corporations will continue to influence politics regardless of which politician gets replaced and they have the money to find all the loopholes, but he keeps steering the conversation back to laying off corrupt politicians (basically it’s the whole ‘liberals protect capital’ aspect of libs).

We talk a lot about games, movies and shows and such, but when politics comes up, the guy sounds like a government representative.