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

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I thought about this a bit and compared it to my reaction and the reaction to many serious leftist Americans to Shrub. We use different language, but several of those points sound like they amount to believing that Obama is not a legitimate president and that he's a horrifically bad one.

In fact, on one point, "38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did", if asked that question about Shrub, I would have responded yes in the sense that I saw a whole lot of proto-fascism in his rhetoric and his policies.

What's different here are several points. First off all, many of these people are confusing facts (claims about Obama being a Muslim or not a US citizen) with opinion, and also while I know a whole lot of people who (like myself) believe that Shrub was the worst US president in a century, believing that Obama may be the anti-christ is a seriously greater level of distrust and dislike than any but a tiny fringe of nutty leftists.

So, what I mostly see is a combination of several factors:

Far greater numbers of people oppose Obama than opposed Shrub, which is clearly driven by the fact that the far-right has a much larger mass media presence that the far left.

The people have a strong tendency to confuse facts and opinions.

Many of these people feel a level of hatred and fear regarding Obama that is substantially greater than any but an exceptionally tiny number of people felt about Shrub.

The result of these three factors means that these people's ideas are self-reinforcing, they are largely impervious to reason, and there a far greater likelihood that some of them are going to get violent. Combine this with the obvious racism, homophobia, and similar hatreds common to many, or perhaps most of these people, and the odds of violence are even higher. In short, these people scare me.

[andrewducker]

They scare me too. I understand (at least partially) the reason why they are the way they are, but I'm still angry, frustrated, and scared by the whole tihng.