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

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

They aren't particularly interested in whether or not that person's a socialist, or a Muslim, or whatever.

No, sorry, you're wrong here. This is dead fucking serious to a lot of Americans. America has had exactly one President who wasn't a Protestant Christian, and we killed him, and I think it'll be a long time before we get another. Mitt Romney's religion (he's a Mormon) is a major factor in why he's unlikely to be run by the Republicans. Religion in American politics--religion in America, period!--matters in a way that you probably have trouble understanding on a visceral level. It is flat out not equivalent to "golfing" in the way that you wrote it off to be.

We're still fighting about whether evolution versus "God created it all" ought to be taught in our public schools because of religious beliefs. Ditto "abstinence only" sex education vs. education that actually teaches things, ditto whether or not pharmacists have a religious right to not dispense prescribed medicine that they have a religious objection to, ditto the place of homosexuals in society (second class citizen or "to be converted"?), ditto ad nauseum.

You asked in another comment whether or not, if you went into the US and asked people, you'd really find 14 out of a 100 people who said that President Obama "may be the Antichrist"?

The answer is: In some areas you'd find far fewer than that. In other areas you'd find it to be a widespread, hardheld conviction. Of course the same thing can be said in America about snakehandling, spontaneous healings, speaking in tongues, feng shui, the imminent Apocalypse, and people rising from the dead.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

The religious aspect is one thing I constantly forget. Thank you for reminding me, and yeah, I totally withdraw that.