How do you negotiate with crazy people?

[andrewducker]

• 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
• 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
• 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"
• 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"
• Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

From

I mean, I know a lot of, say, Conservatives in the UK have beliefs I don't agree with.  But the vast majority of them, so far as I can tell, just have different experiences to me, and different opinions about how things should be organised.  They don't believe that the leader of the oppositon is the fucking antichrist, or other things that can be disproved by 30 seconds with Google.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I can judge their opinions. I don't blame individuals for holding opinions that are clearly reality-divergent, I blame the system and society they're brought up in. but I can certainly hold a person responsible for not looking into things in more detail and attempting to educate themselves (whilst bearing in mind the social and educational environment that they come from).

I'm certainly not laughing at anyone. I'm bloody furious at the system/culture/media, not at the individuals on the ground. What I want, as the original post said, is a way to negotiate with people whose beliefs and opinions are based on lies and mythology.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Dude, I totally agree with you here, and if the OP had said this, I wouldn't have commented in the first place. Quoting those surveys without any analysis is... out-of-place, somehow, and feeds into the general snobbish UK geek-culture narrative of "those americans are stupid". If I saw more comments like the one I'm replying to here and less reposts of polls without context then I probably wouldn't go off on this stuff.

[andrewducker]

Could you try to avoid going off anyway? Or go off in your own journal? I don't mind you saying (as Wildeabandon did) that these things are generally biased, etc. I'm all behind being corrected on my stupidity. I just react badly to anger directed at me, particularly if it feels like it's based on things I didn't say.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I want to take this in the context of lots of the conversations we've had here, not just on this post. In this post I'm not angry, and that the communication appears to have anger in it is probably based in that context. In many of the other conversations, actually I have been angry sometimes because you were doing things I perceived to be really unhelpful and harmful to me and people I really care about!

So in that situation... well, I dunno. Do you expect me to pretend not to be angry? Or not to get angry in the first place?

I know that it's no fun being yelled at, I don't like it either. I respond to it pretty badly too. But when I've pissed someone off, well, they're going to be angry with me, right?

[andrewducker]

I have no control over your emotions, and I wouldn't want to control them. Your emotions are yours.

Your actions, on the other hand, are things I feel I do have a right to talk about, and to react to. And I feel justified in asking people to refrain from certain actions in my journal, no matter what their emotional state might be.

If you feel terribly angry about something and want to express that in an aggressive manner then I'd suggest that your journal is the right place for that :-> If you feel terribly angry about something and are willing to engage in an assertive manner then I'm very happy to engage with that.

Of course it's not as simple as that, and I generally try to err on side of engagement, because I don't want to end up not listening to people just because they're angry. But there are definitely limits to my energy, as I'm sure there are to yours, and I know that both of us are a lot less drained when we're not shouting at each other :->

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure. I just wanted to be clear what you were asking. If you'd like your LJ to be a place where that doesn't happen, then that's cool, as I suggested a while back by PM, I don't wanna engage if all that does is be draining and unhelpful.

I think that the split you're making between "aggressive" and "assertive" is a split which makes more sense in your head than in mine. I do see a kind of "assertive" based on calm logical strong arguing that you and lots of other people do, but if I do that it comes out as sarcastic and cold, so perhaps what you're asking for would be best satisfied if I didn't engage here.

Are your Interesting LJ Links available via RSS? I enjoy reading them. :)

[andrewducker]

The assertive/aggressive thing is something I got from an assertiveness training course, and from the counselling I did. It's not something that works for everyone, I'm sure.

Links are available at:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/andyduckerlinks/
and also at:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/AndrewDucker
(which is where they come from - http://delicious.com/AndrewDucker is where I tag them to in the first place)

[andrewducker]

I have to say that, say, at the moment, you're not coming across as sarcastic and cold at all. You're coming across as, well, human :->

Same, say, here:
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/1998022.html?thread=13456838#t13456838

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Well, no, because I'm not expressing my opinions about things I dislike. When I express my opinions about things I'm angry and upset about, I'm angry and upset. When I don't, I'm not. I'm not some hysterical character that can't stop expressing emotions, but I also won't suppress them to be calm and logical if I don't feel it. I'll communicate directly, which is what I'm doing. If I ever come across as "not human", for heaven's sake, CAPTCHA me.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

I think there are a couple of things that you do when you're angry which aren't expressions of anger per se, and tend to be what makes it hard to engage with you. One is that you stop responding to what someone actually said, and start responding to what you assume they meant based on the least charitable assumption of what they said. The other is that you insult the person you're arguing with (or a generalised group of people that you assume they belong to), rather than talking about what's actually being discussed.

There are plenty of ways of expressing anger without doing these things.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

That seems fair enough, although I think your modifier in parantheses is important - I've spent my entire life being taught to question things, and can't imagine whether I'd be inclined to do so otherwise.

What I want, as the original post said, is a way to negotiate with people whose beliefs and opinions are based on lies and mythology.
Understood, but a good place to start would probably be a)not calling them crazy and b)trying to understand why they've come to their views and beliefs on that basis. Exasperating as Cas's comments may have been, their suggestion that there need to be people espousing facts and sense in a way that isn't simultaneously sneering at people who don't initially agree is a good one.