I recently left a job where my coworker was the absolute dumbest motherfucker I have ever met, but at least he was willing to listen to people with differing opinions. I think I managed to pull him a little left, at the very least he started out going “the people in charge generally know what is best for us even if they sometimes dip into things themselves” and ended with “fuck ice, they’re fascists acting exactly like the nazis did and the shitbags in charge are enabling them at every turn, the whole system needs reset” which is a pretty big leap, IMO.

One thing I couldn’t budge him on was the moon landing. It doesn’t matter that I have assisted in a laser range-finding experiment using the retro reflectors left on the moon, thus confirming to myself that we HAVE been there.

It didn’t matter how much I explained the Apollo missions, how much I explained why things behave in space the way they do, how much I explained why NASA essentially hd to rebuild a moon mission from the ground up, or any number of things. He still firmly believed it was all bullshit and we never went there.

I would always end the conversation about space stuff with “the biggest reason to me is that the USSR never came out and said ‘this is fake, here’s proof they faked the landing’ and basically gave up not long afterward, and they clearly had spies and intelligence capable of infiltrating NASA systems and obtaining classified information, just look at the Russian space shuttle. If they knew we faked it, they would have every reason in the world to embarss us by revealing our lies to the world” and he would always agree on that point. Still fake to him though