Thanks for a civilized and thoughtful response.

I spent over thirty years in the US. I saw no evidence that Americans were one whit smarter than that.

Look at American foreign policy - tens of trillions of dollars wasted, millions of innocent lives killed, and yet the anti-war movement, which was big when I moved to the United States, was a tiny fraction of itself by the time I left.

Oh, Democrats would demonstrate against Republican wars all right, but the demonstrations against Obama's wars of choice in Libya, Syria and Yemen had hundreds or even dozens of people.

(A low point for me was one demonstration in NYC where less than a hundred people showed up, though someone did tell me to "Go back to Russia!" which made me happy.)

This is why both R and D vie to see who can budget more for the military - because it's wildly popular to piss money away like water on a series of genocides that also fail to achieve US military interests.

Or take Amazon. Realistically, Amazon is a terrible threat to the jobs of 90% of Americans. Their policy of pushing their workers to the limits of human endurance for the least wages they can pay, and expecting many of them to break and simply not caring, is extremely "competitive", because of course it's cheaper to treat people like shit and underpay them.

And yet Amazon is wildly popular among Americans. Just telling people, "I haven't been on Amazon in years," is a conversation stopper, and people can't even imagine why you would do that.

(No, I don't bring it into conversations, but you are aware how often people say, "Have you noticed recently on Amazon that...?")

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And what exactly is the point of having a discussion with someone who is not just uninterested in facts and logic, but thinks of compassion as weakness and cruelty as a virtue?

Most Republicans on my Facebook page eventually said something so horrifying, usually against a friend of mine, that I had to unfriend them, simply for my own mental health.

There are a few who are left, mainly because we never touch on any issues of substance at all.

But there will never be any agreement with them nor any way to make progress resolving the issue of our age.

There's actually a guy here in Amsterdam, a man I feel some warmth toward because we're almost exactly the same age, and there's a huge rift between him and his family.

He's a reporter. I had read his work before he converted to... whatever it is.

Just as were about to become friends, we hung out drinking and he told me his whole world view - chemtrails, climate change a hoax, Muslim rape gangs terrorising Europe.

We didn't really argue - he's too pathetic, is the honest reason.

Later, I drilled into the climate emergency and explained as he willingly listened how the greenhouse effect worked, how we have known about it for over a century, how we have pushed constantly increasing and accelerating amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

And he was really interested! He asked questions and contradicted nothing.

And yet... it did not change his beliefs on climate, or anything else, to the slightest degree.

The last time I saw him, a couple of months before COVID, he was smoking as usual, but he'd broken the filters off. "Hey, I found out on 4chan that it isn't cigarettes that cause cancer, it's the filters! I'm trying to convince my mother [who must be in her 80s] to start smoking because she's having trouble with her lungs." (I wish I were joking, but that's almost word-for-word.)

To be honest, I avoid him if I can. My wife just gets up and walks away when he shows up somewhere.