So... I've been "corresponding" with a couple of..

[Bigmack]

rightwing semi-teabaggers. They send me these viral emails and I send them the debunking of those emails. They send a lot because there's lots of them. Those people never write anything original, so I figure there must be a "Viral Email Central" that makes that shit up and starts it on its way.

I have debunked every one... every single one. Even the non-political ones like the pic of the mountain lion behind the elk hunter and his trophy.

Every single one! Many times with three sites... snopes, politifact, and factcheck. Shit Yahooanswers and urbanlegends, too.

These poor deluded assholes now both say that all those debunking sites are liberal and biased, and not to be believed.

Why bother doing the work? Actually, I've learned a lot of information, but I've also learned first-hand that those people are not swayed by facts.

In the last three days.... Obama is keeping the overseas military from voting, Obama spurned help from the CEO of IBM in Medicare fraud, Obama has a private army now that "Obamacare" has passed, Obama has put two Muslims on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, the 1% transaction tax, Michelle Obama's hospital job, WWIII started in 1979...with the Muslims.

All debunked. All with either no response or "You see it your way and I see it my way."

I'm cutting them off. They are totally impossible to reason with, because they don't run on reason, they run on belief.
(Actually, I've been convalescing from surgery and have had a lot of sitting-around time. Now I'm 100% again and have no time for this bullshit.)

I'm a student of history, and I don't believe we have ever had a period of time in our history where so much of the population had such a rapid exchange of lies and incorrect information. The Web is actually spreading lies and irrational ideas faster than fact and knowledge. Faux Snews spreads this shit directly into their minds. And nothing will sway them.

This election, whoever wins.... we lose. The whackjobs will just be encouraged if they win, and they'll be batshit crazy if they lose... well, batshit crazier.

[ixion]

1. There's no point in using facts and/or logic when dealing with neocons

they're operating on a purely emotive level where facts are simply "liberal bias".

[T Wolf]

2. 99.99999% of them are unreachable and spending time trying to "reason" with them is a total waste

of time and effort.

Save yourself the aggravation.

[HereSince1628]

4. It could even be worse than a waste of time...

there has been some evaluation of how people who have a false belief respond to having it challenged with an argument. And the results suggest that rather changing a person's mind it simply makes them more dogged in their belief.

The best thing to do is to chuckle and say "Oh, that's funny!" and quickly move on with what you were doing. It undermines their view of how the exchange should have gone.

[Angry Dragon]

3. For 15-20 years i have told people that this country

was heading to a revolution of some kind.
Was not sure what kind, but now it seems it
will a little more violent than some people would
like.

At this point in time, Martial law would not
be out of the question. If that happens, watch out.

[TlalocW]

5. I used to do the same - until the emails to me slacked off

I would get the latest stuff forwarded to me by a conservative aunt and uncle, and I would reply all and go down the forwarded lists in the email which people never erase and make sure they were in the cc box as well. Then I would go through and eviscerate the talking points. I would use Snopes a lot, but just the logic of some of the statements just plain don't make sense, and I would put in the correct facts, name call whatever republican (usually W) the email was defending, etc and send it out.

One cousin on my dad's side in Texas sent me an email saying she was blocking me from now on (fine... didn't know her anyway) and telling me that dad (a democrat-voting member of a steel-workers union who would call Reagan a lying bastard whenever he came on TV) was rolling over in his grave because of me. :) Eventually, the emails stopped coming until Mom started forwarding them to me, telling me to, "Debunk this crap."

TlalocW