It's hard to be more obnoxious and delusional than social justice warriors-belive me, I've tried. But it's possible. The tinfoil hat conspiracy crowd are the most obnoxious people out there. Royally arrogant, these people think they are the beacons of truth and all of us dummies are kept in the darkness. They'll take quotes vastly out of context and they'll ignore the facts that don't agree with their theory. These people haven't advanced past the first grade intellectually but act like they have advanced doctorates.
I wonder how to properly deal with them. We can ignore them-which might be best for all of us, them included-or we can attempt to reason with them. Reasoning with them sounds nice and sweet-after all I think all of us want to think the best in people and that they'd be open to reason -but trying to reason with a full blooded tinfoil hat wearer is like trying to reason with a die hard Bernie or Trump supporter. You can be articulate, reasonable, succinct and factually correct- and they'll ignore you because, like Mulder in the X-Files-they want to to believe.
Michael Shermer is the founder of the Skeptics Society. He's an atheist/agnostic and a fairly liberal guy politically-but I still like him and he's a right about a lot. He wrote a great piece about why people believe in conspiracies and you can read it here.
Another Michael, Michael Medved has a radio show and he'd do a monthly show dedicated to conspiracies. It was extremely depressing to listen to-whack job true believers would call in and try to convince him of their latest crazy belief-and poor Medved would try to debunk it. I had to stop listening because I found it incredibly depressing that people believed in them.
No comments:
Post a Comment