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

[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.