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]

There is a difference between his refering to the views as idiocy, and claiming that they're all idiots - plenty of smart people believe stupid things. (c.f. our past selves - probably also our present selves)

Do you have a better suggestion on how to respond to, "I think you were mean so you are wrong"?
"...so you are wrong" != "...so I'm not willing to engage whilst you're behaving like this". A better response to the latter is "Okay, here's my point without the insults".

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with you here and I'm not sure how to explain in what way. I think we've got a really different approach to this kind of conversation.