NHLycan
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New Hampshire
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This thread makes me wonder.
There are some bizarre and obviously wrong ideas which refuse to fade. For the purpose of politeness, let's choose Flat Earth Theory to kick around. It checks both boxes nicely. If you don't subscribe to this bit of madness, you probably find it incomprehensible that anyone would.
People who espouse this fall into two buckets; the crazy and the evil.
For an interlocutor the difference in approach between the two is not small. Kindness versus contempt.
I hope we'll all agree that it's preferable to treat the damaged (crazy) with a degree of kindness. After all, there but for the grace of God and whatnot. That doesn't mean coddling, because you shouldn't indulge them but cruelty for crueltys' sake is evil.
Simultaneously, and this can be difficult, you need to accept the futility of dialogue. This is a belief they have. A faith, if you will. It's not addressed by logic or evidence. Full stop. If these folks were suseptable to reason on this subject, they wouldn't hold the beliefs they do. It's not a condition able to be shifted by argument. It's not like the truth is hidden. Cause that up there is the moon, and that over there is the sun. If you've been on a plane, you might have seen the curve of the earth.
So walk away from the topic. If you and they are lucky, this may be the only hole in their heads. They might be perfectly nice otherwise. Or the bats have completely taken over the belfry. If you feel like taking the time to find out, good on you. YMMV.
Now let's toddle on over to the other hand; the (evil) liars. We call it 'trolling' online. That's as good a name as any other.
I'm not clear on what motivates this. Could it be a hatred of the idea of truth? It could be a hatred of their fellow humans. They seem to exist only to inspire frustration. Seriously, if you have an insight into whatever is going on inside someone like this, I'm interested. I wouldn't be surprised if doing this habitually causes a slide down the Turing Scale towards non-sophont.
If you engage with these wankers it should be on your terms. As a kind of mental masturbation. If you get a kick from it, hey, go ahead and relive that Monthy Python Argument Room skit. But that's all you're doing. There is nothing like a dialogue happening. There can't be.
I'm a big fan of blocking. There's more fulfilling things to do. These toenails aren't going to clip themselves, right? Again, YMMV.
There IS something else that needs to be asked: how do we tell these groups apart? I don't have a great answer for that. I'd suspect that the liars are more likely to reach for the normal bag of bad faith argument modes. Ad hominem, Gish Gallop, Tu Quoque, etc. And especially gaslighting. Oh goodness, I bet they love gaslighting. Because liars are going to lie. But just because they're liars doesn't mean they're dumb, so maybe not.
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