Honor wrote:I doubt Atlanticmike has a coherent political view, really, and is mostly parroting the quips and kinds of ad hominem mud slinging one sees portrayed as political debate on network television and talk shows. But so are his opponents here. So it's not exactly his fault.
My right-wing friend gets bent out of shape over every chain email he receives from his network of right-wingers. His first words of the morning might be shouting about a new law in California allowing all murderers to go free effective immediately. When you get to the source, he's received an email. You allow him to just forward the email that one time because he can't explain it. You copy paste the first line into Google, read him back what Snopes says, and then repeat for other claims within that email. What can he say? The next email comes and it's the same thing. Sometimes, it's a little harder, maybe 10% of the time there isn't a quick answer and so I have to spend twenty minutes figuring it out. One of those was a mocked-up war story similar to that dramatization DCP posted about the 9/11 flight that jumped the terrorists, and so there was a grain of fact but the overall picture was BS. Like answering Ajax's questions, you can spend hours and hours patiently providing answers and he just jumps to the next thing. It doesn't matter how many times this scenario repeats and his stuff is wrong, he has zero skepticism upon receipt of the next email. Why? Because while he'll back down once he sees a claim refuted, he doesn't really believe the claim is wrong; it's still right in spirit. Okay, California may not have just passed a law allowing all murderers in prison to go free, but by golly,
that's exactly the kind of nonsense you'd expect out of California! So all of this junk swirling in his brain is really the truth for him in the most important sense, independent of whether every single last bit of it is shown to be false.
How many hours in the day do I have to devote drinking from Styx with a sieve for this guy? There's a parallel to the apologists as they point to everything published by Mormon scholars in the last fifty years and demand critics to study all of it before they're allowed to have an opinion. It's increasing the cost of being a critic, or a 'liberal'. So to put the cost back on him, I've told him to look his stuff up on Snopes himself. And if it's not there, I want him to research it for at least twenty minutes before making me do it. And if I have to do it, depending on how stupid it is, then I'll give him a good answer but I have free license to be as insulting about it as possible. Usually that doesn't mean toward him directly, but toward right-wingers generally and specifically, the individual who sent the email. The price of labor has to go up. As you've said elsewhere, you don't click on the threads because it's a waste of your time. Responding to stupidity with mud slinging is just a way to allocate costs a little more fairly. It's either that or just ignore.
We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have. They get rid of some of the people who have been there for 25 years and they work great and then you throw them out and they're replaced by criminals.
