I have come to the conclusion that when you are debating politics with a conservative, it gets worse the more you are accurate.
I recently engaged in a long discussion on Facebook over whether or not Barack Obama has destroyed our economy. I pointed out several key indicators (jobs, GDP, stock market, debt/deficit) which indicate that he has not "destroyed" our economy. In fact, it has vastly improved on his watch. As I presented them with more and more data, they grew increasingly hostile. One fellow named Dana eventually wrote this.
I hope that you and the rest of the liberals in this country do us a favor and end your own lives.
I have to admit that I was pretty shocked by this statement. No one in the group (about 14 people) called him out on it. In fact, they kept piling on me. I did get a message from a guy named Connor who told me that Dana said the same thing to him. How can someone like this be so angry? The whole discussion certainly confirms many of the assertions I've made about conservatives in the past (adolescent, anger, hate, fear etc) but something new came out of it.
As we near the end of the Obama presidency, our country continues to improve in a number of sectors. Like the frustrated child that simply can't take someone doing a better job than they do, conservatives are going to grow more petulant...more hateful...more angry...and behave in ways that we probably can't imagine.
I'd advise all of you to be careful about future discussions like this and realize that facts may no longer help. It seems now that they make it worse.
4 comments:
There have been a number of articles about this phenomenon recently, especially with regard to climate change.
Being proved wrong only serves to make some people dig in on their beliefs. They might start out not being quite sure, but when they're proved wrong they become intransigent.
When shown the error of their ways, it becomes a matter of faith, and if it isn't true, then they vow to do everything they can to make it true: like take over the Florida governor's office and ban the use of the phrase "climate change" to make the problem go away.
You shouldn't be surprised by this phenomenon. People have been conditioned into this kind of thinking -- making themselves believe things they know are false for millennia. They laud this way of thinking and they believe it's a virtue and not a flaw. It's called "religion."
And if you refuse to believe that, look at the facts. There are seven billion people in the world and there are thousands of religions. Each of the major religions is split into as many as hundreds of sects. Most of them claim to be the one true religion and that all the other ones are false. Many of them go to war because they believe these other religions are so wrong. These days it's Shia against Sunni in in the Middle East and Muslims against Christians in parts of Africa, but in years past it was Catholics against Protestants, Christians against Muslims, Romans against Christians, Romans against Jews, Akhenaten against the entire Egyptian pantheon. True, the real underlying motivation for all these wars has been power and territory, but religion justifies the killing and provides the pretext.
But what this means that in the view of most every religious believer, the vast majority of other religious believers are completely wrong, utterly misled and deceived by false prophets or Lucifer himself. Christians are constantly providing each other with "proof" of their beliefs from the very same bible that arrive at completely contradictory conclusions and end up calling each other heretics.
The thing is, religion is a creation of man, not gods. We can see the process of this creation happening right before our eyes, with people like L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, or David Khoresh and his groupies in Waco, or Joe Smith and Mormonism, or Charles Taze Russell and the Jehovah's Witnesses, or Mohammed and the Muslims, or Luther and the Protestants, or Siddhartha and the Buddhists, or Moses and the Jews.
Religion is a tool to maintain political power, a mechanism to allow a leader to exert control over others at a remove, so they don't have to be physically present to threaten others into submission.
Good words, Nikto, and I have to say the whole exchange has made me rethink my position on presenting facts to people who are that steeped in belief. Perhaps it's best to let them figure it out on their own (if they ever will) because if they sense they are out of their depth, they behave rather poorly.
About that booming economy. Oh, I know, the NYT is just another right-wing news source.
Let's wait and see what the next two revisions bring as well as April and May.
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