Catsidhe

How to Combat These Techniques

The important thing to remember is that you are dealing with a person who has essentially placed a twig on their head and expects you to believe they are a tree. Armored in that level of "confidence," almost anything you say will be construed by them as evidence that their tree disguise is working, so you will have to be very specific and to the point in addressing exactly what they're doing and why it's not fooling anyone.

Subtlety and sarcasm are great tools but there is no way in hell they will get through to this poor sap. Unless you're just toying with them for your amusement, the best way to put an end to it is just to be direct. Point them to this guide if necessary, explain that you know what they are doing, and that it is so obvious it can be seen from space.

Chances are they will just end up placing more twigs on their head, praying fervently that this will succeed, but at least you gave it your best shot.

Look up "narcissistic personality disorder". Basically, assume that the only way he can distinguish good statements from bad statements is by how they make him feel; if they make him feel important and special, they're good, if they make him feel unimportant or bad, they're bad. "True", in the sense that you probably think of it, is simply a noise without any kind of semantic content in his world. You'll note this trait among many internet kooks; the guy who's basically taken over soc.religion.quaker so he can rant about how it's all his ex-wife's fault and also some crackpot scholar proved Jesus was an ordinary man who lived 100 years later than everyone else thought is the most revolutionary and brilliant scholar ever... Well, same basic traits. We have one on a forum I hang out on, where he's threatened repeatedly to reveal to my employer that I don't understand dynamic memory allocation in C, and one on another forum who has spent several years trying to get people to recognize that it was *very aggressive* of one of the other posters to tell him "don't be silly" when he said something ridiculous.

It's one of the scariest disorders, because it is extremely well-tuned to preserve itself; the disorder consists of being deeply, passionately, sure that there is nothing wrong with oneself, and having an amazing capacity for filtering out any and all data which might seem to lead away from this belief.

I learned on the news today that Tiger Woods has been putting his pee-pee in very many ladies. I am outraged!!!! Tiger how could you?!?! I am so outraged, I will never play, or watch, or pay any attention to golf ever again. Or, come to think of it, ever before. I believe that moral values are eternal, and so must be defended in a time-invariant manner.

The fact is that the political right, at least in the US and among those sections of Australian opinion that take their lead from the US, has become utterly unhinged from reality, to the point where anyone who relies on rightwing sources for information is bound to be deluded. Even where individual pieces of evidence may be factually correct, they are selected to support delusional claims such as those cited above, with the often overwhelming evidence to the contrary being disregarded.

“Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

...

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

...”