Sean Spicer is the best Press Secretary in history. PERIOD.

This works with his supporters. I made the mistake of checking Facebook this weekend and saw all of my right wing friends angry about how huge the inauguration audience was and how the media is lying.

When a good portion of the population will eat up everything he says as fact, how do you win? I tied to argue the audience on FB, and they were quoting these odd right wing sites, they don’t read or trust regular news agencies.

There isn’t any reaching these people, sadly. They got off the reality train long, long ago. There’s just finally a politician willing to brazenly court their madness, rather than just dog whistle at it.

I’d say wait for 'em to die, but there’s still a ton of people from my old high school in rural TN on my FB. There’s plenty of young people caught up in this wave of anti-intellectual insanity, too.

So, I dunno. Maybe Timex has the right of it. Just beat the Nazis in the face until they shut up or get better :)

Ultimately? Use of force.

Sad though that may be, once the fundamental basis of facts is abandoned, rational discourse is no longer possible. If someone no longer accepts the fabric of reality, and instead believes in a fantasy world, the potential to reason with them no longer exists.

If their fantasy is harmless, and impacts no one, then it doesn’t really matter.

If their fantasy results in harmful repercussions to other people, then they have become a danger to themselves and others, and become indistinguishable from any other mentally ill person.

Note, this is not meant to apply simply to those who disagree with you. Hell, I disagree with most everyone here on a number of things. But those disagreements are based on matters of opinion. In terms of simple facts, like “There were more people in attendance of Obama’s inauguration than Trump’s” there can be no real disagreement. It is simply a matter of recorded history. To disagree with such a thing is to reject reality, just as a schizophrenic person does.

I came to this same realization a couple months back and I still don’t see how to resolve it.

How do you combat willful ignorance and a complete inability to accept opposing viewpoints no matter how much evidence is provided? I’m struggling with this. I mean, I can only really see one endgame here and it doesn’t involve dialog.

Figure that out and share it and I’ll be on speaking terms with some of my family.

I feel the same way and it’s horribly depressing. I have 2 small children. If we break out into civil war, what kind of world have I brought them into?

I’m already gradually limiting their contact with my side of the family. They’re all Trumpsters and completely deny reality if it clashes with their Conservative Christian world view.

I wonder if things have always been this bad and it’s just amplified by social media. I remember going to church as a kid and the sunday school teachers telling me that my school teachers were pawns of the devil (because they would eventually teach evolution). At 6 years old, this authority figure holding up a picture of a chimpanzee in a suit, telling me that in school my teachers were lying because they were Satanic agents and wanted me to burn in hell. This was in Massachusetts, btw.

How do you reason with that? You can’t. I woke up to it around 16-17 and walked away.

The sad part is, the Spicer BS works on the Trump supporters. My cousin, who is in his early 40’s, married with 4 kids, lives in DeSota Missouri. He posted a large Facebook rant against the media this morning that summed up with “Don’t believe the media. This was the largest inauguration in the history of the world. The media is lying to you”.

His only source of information is what the Trump camp is saying, and he believes it all. You can’t fight against that kind of blind faith. Trump has developed his own pool of fundamentalists.

Largely from the pool of Fundamentalists. Almost like the capacity to believe random, oftentimes (with these sorts of people, at least) hate-adjacent things with no basis in objective reality in one part of your life coincides with the ability to do elsewhere. . .

In fairness to those with the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia, they are not rejecting reality, they are unable to recognize the difference between what is reality and what is delusion or hallucination. This is very different than those, like Spicer and Conway, who actively reject or deny reality. It’s psychosis versus denialism.

http://imgur.com/RPi7YPD

Ultimately, for it to be resolved non-violently, Trump has to screw them over royally in a way that will get through their heads. On the plus side, he is certainly capable of that.

However, the more they buy in and deny, the deeper they are tied to it and him. Here’s a good article explaining it

I feel that people have a wrong headed idea about what conservatives are after. They’re not looking to make things better even for themselves. What they want to do is pull everyone down to look, thinks and act like them. It really is tribal identity stuff without the fetishes and feathered headdresses. Christianity is as much a fetish you wear in public as it is a get out of jail free card for being irresponsible dumbasses.

I’ve been thinking about this a bunch, and I think the answer is about moving your goalposts. We are basically going through another Reformation - the catholic church of science is corrupted by the publish-or-perish obsession that has lead to p-hacking, and the increasing detachment from public accountability that comes from over-specialization. At the same time, the world is waking up to the tools of interpretation (the internet in general making it possible for more and more people to publish their ideas and critique others), just like vernacular translations and printing presses made the bible directly accessible, obviating the need for priests. So the end result was a schism and a ton of wars, but ultimately two main approaches: either you are in favor of priestly interpretation and mediation, or you are not. Either way, your beliefs are now respected and make about as much sense (none), so it doesn’t seem like that big a deal anymore.

I think the same thing will happen with science - one faction focuses on making scientists and journals more accountable and less corrupt, while the other side focuses on establishing a science for non-scientists. At some point, the Breitbarts and Info Wars of the world need to actually do something and not just argue. At that point, they will gravitate towards actual facts and the scientific method, because those things are capable of actual magic. In the process they will throw out a bunch of stuff we hold dear (except it’s climate change solutions, human rights, and universal healthcare instead of salvation through deeds, purgatory, and transubstantiation), and hopefully the world survives because the people who still give a shit do everything they can to solve the problems, instead of bending their effort to defeating the heretics in a series of bloody wars.

So what I’m mostly saying is, what do you do when you are fighting an enemy with more powerful technology? You look for battlegrounds where your tech is better suited. Science isn’t about winning an argument, it’s about predicting the future and creating devices to manipulate it. Make better predictions and devices and stop trying to win arguments against technology designed to do that.

I came to the same conclusion here in Australia with my father. Fortunately he doesn’t hate anyone (that I am aware of), but for many years he has firmly believed that Scientists either lie deliberately or are really stupid when they talk about Evolution, and that the ‘Creation Scientists’ have it right. With that ability to reject scientific evidence firmly entrenched, he had no trouble disbelieving every chart, argument, and theory relating to climate change. Talking to him about climate change is very frustrating, because at the end of the day the root cause of his disbelief is having no respect for scientific evidence (at least biology and climatology, he relies on all other branches of science every day with all the modern technology).

Ted Lieu, my representative :)

Trump’s next executive order, incoming in 5… 4… 3… 2…

I haven’t seen this one yet, so I made it for you guys. Feel free to use it shall you wish to. Sorry the size it’s so small, but that’s the original I could find quickly before going to bed: