I have a personal encounter story:
Yesterday afternoon I met a friend at a brewery. We started chatting with a guy who was sitting near us, he said he was the first to show for a beer meet-up that was arranged on a forum, I asked what forum, he said "have you ever heard of a place called resetera?"
I didn't feel like blocking any limp-wristed punches so instead of saying I was a kiwi I just feigned ignorance. Another person joined him for the meet-up event, apparently there were supposed to be a dozen joiners but these two were the only ones who didn't ghost on it without bothering to tell anyone. Anyway the subject of Puerto Rico came up because I mentioned another friend of mine recently went on a business trip there, we started talking about the possible future of Puerto Rico gaining statehood or becoming independent or whatever. They both said it would be fantastic for the democrats if the island became a state because obviously the fine poor poc people of the island would naturally vote unanimously for DNC representatives to the house. For sake of argument, we stipulated that the population of the island would qualify it for 8 seats - probably not accurate based on its population but that wasn't important for the conversation.
Because they were clearly ignorant of it, I explained that there is a cap of 435 seats in the House of Representatives, and if a new state joins the union its seats would have to to be apportioned away from existing states, they wouldn't simply be added out of nothing. So even if you presumed the island would get 8 solid blue seats, they'd have to come at the cost of seats elsewhere that might be blue seats anyway. One of them simply could not grasp the concept that there was a cap on the number of reps in the House. The other one got the concept but just got hung up on "well then we can take the 8 seats from republican-held states". This one was similarly frustrated when I explained you don't just get to take them from wherever you want, they get redistributed based on population.
Have you ever explained something to someone who had a really wrong idea and they wanted to learn or at least get the concept of what you were saying? Or just wanted to change the subject but kept being friendly like a normal human anyway? Yeah, that wasn't these two hunyucks. My friend and I quickly got the pouty frowns and huffy sighing under the breath that indicated I was ruining the fun of the truthiness in their guts with my "all facts, no heart" attitude toward knowledge. To them, talking politics or world events was not what you do to gain or exchange knowledge, it's what you do because bitching about the correct enemies is fun and right to do and anyone who corrects your mistaken beliefs is doing it wrong. Eventually we left for greener pastures.
Oh, and I haven't mentioned it because the subject of trans issues didn't come up at all, but in case you guys are wondering, yes of course one of these two was trans.
). I believe it was Rinsfury who initially had to deal with an troll impersonator lol.
