Last night at work I had the rare political/social discussion with a person I work closely with.
It started with him talking about a past employer who did not offer medical benefits (or really any benefits) reacting to his employees talking about unionizing by offering the people who stayed a couple extra dollars an hour. The guy telling the story was obviously the hero, because despite not getting any benefits he was able to get a $5/hr increase. He said he felt kind of bad taking advantage of the situation. My response was that I don't have any sympathy for employers in a nation where health insurance is primarily provided by employers who don't provide health insurance. He came back with how horrible it is in Canada. I said I've heard a mix of experiences, but that besides Canada the rest of the world doesn't base health coverage on employment, so I have no sympathy for employers in the U.S. (a nation whose health insurance is employment based) don't offer insurance.
He had a pretty killer comeback. First, he had been to Canada, and wait times were a big deal. Second, when I said but people there don't die from treatable illnesses because they are poor he said "maybe that's a good thing." I said, "We'll my family has been poor, should I have died because my family was poor?" He obfuscated, and then said that it'd be okay if some poor people died because we need less people. To that I suggested that in addition to letting people die due to not being able to afford insurance we should also do what China has done by limiting who can have children. He had a good laugh and said "see, we agree."
We then went on and he spouted off on various religions and I had to frequently correct him on the basics of the worlds most common religions. For instance We started talking about India and he dove into some ridiculous anti-islam anecdote about some weird *** muslim in a barber shop talking about how the U.S. needs to burn, and in the meantime shave my head to look like a [cat] and the guy was watching porn on his phone the whole time. I asked him, "So this guy was Hindi?" That was a real stumper for him. We eventually figured out that he was confused and thought we were talking about some other random country in the "middle east" where they're Muslims. I explained how India split into two nations, one majority Hindu, the other (Pakistan) the majority Muslim. That was a very interesting fact to him.
Somehow Buddhism came up. It came up with this guy explaining to me that Buddhists believe in Jesus and Moses and stuff, but also believe in their own prophets. I had to back him up a little and explain that the Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet, but that Muhammed was a more significant prophet. It was really confusing for him.
Just in case anyone is wondering, this guy is a Trump supporter.
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