Hillary was not a good candidate, but I never would have guessed that you could win by trying to appeal to only people that believe things that are objectively false. Unless I missed it, at no point in time did Trump ever solicit a single vote from people that understand how to discern truth from fiction.

Well, a book club where you read the agreed-upon novel and they read quotes from the Bible of Kek and then went back to watching Fox News. My sincere answer for engaging with Trump supporters (though many are hopeless) is to attack the flaws in their ideology rather than challenging them with empirical evidence. Find inconsistencies in their statements and logical errors in their arguments and keep pressing.

I wouldn't have made this otherwise.

Thankfully, not all of them are. The millennials in my family like myself are gonna be all right. It's some of the olds that are dumb when it comes to this.

So do what I did. Start small - with one person who cares what you think - like your Mom. Explain to her that without a shared set of facts, there can be no dialog. Have a negotiation where you agree on impartial news sources. Exclude everything else. Describe it as an experiment over some time frame, doesn't have to be permanent. If your Mom refuses to do this, then she values politics over her relationship with you.

Entertaining thread, thanks Bob.

Start by downloading the good ol' how to win friends and influence people to your phone and listening to it a few times.

Not even joking.

I don't think the Socratic yes-yes method is going to work on Trump supporters. You might get them to moderate their positions on a few things but whatever made them that hateful as a group will keep reassering itself in your absence.

Yeah they really are like children, and you have to decide if or how to talk to them based on the functionality of their frontal lobes.

Like there's really not a lot of upside to telling my old religious aunt that I'm an atheist. But if I had the trust of someone like Lestat for example, I'd probably put in some effort talking to him about food stamps.

I think it's also good to be on the harsh side with hopeless trump supporters if there are others around listening that are indifferent to politics. Their inclination will be to distance themselves from the dumb guy.

I bet cult de-programming techniques would be a productive avenue to explore. First step is removing them from the source of their brainwashing.

grunching

slowly

Here's an on-topic article by Michael Shermer in the Jan Sci-Am that might be useful:

http://www.michaelshermer.com/2017/0...mine-evidence/

in the morning, one should greet a trump supporter with "dobroye utro, comrade", and in the evenings one should greet a trump supporter with "Dobryy vecher, comrade"

i disagree, but regardless don't just go against their facts first and put them on the defensive. the first thing i'd talk to them about is actually the book itself, hoping some of them will read/listen to it.

Ok but all this says is that people double down on stupid, and that it's a well-established effect. Why does he stop there and just shoehorn an opinion in at the end? If it's because there's no research on how to effectively flip the backfire effect, that would be incredibly telling about the prospects of positive engagement.

(My question is rhetorical, not really directed at Howard.)

How you going to get them off facebook

I'm just guessing here but I imagine you are a fairly young man.

I've tried this, it really doesn't work. What works for general personality types on matters of less conviction does not work on low-iq, aggressive hateful people.

With quasi-fascist people the only thing that really works is social exclusion and shame. Why do you think they are always complaining about being called racists when they obviously are? It may not change their opinions but they will tend to keep to themselves and alter their behavior to match societal expectations. They are much more suggestible to conformity than left-wingers are.

I think you'd enjoy reading the book again or for the first time. The principle you mentioned isn't the bulk of the book. The majority of the book is about how to make people feel before you drive home the point.

Low-iq or uneducated or whatever, they are still human. Which implies irrationality under certain conditions.

You don't think the two ideas flow into each other?

The problem with the typical Trump voter is that they are basically xenophobes and there are very visceral reasons that go deep into the psyche why humans are like that. It is pretty much hard-wired.

tell its part of the globalist conspiracy run by (((mark cuckerberg))).

The King Philosophy

Something like that and i would not initiate and let them bring it up.

psh, what does that guy know? Trump voters are REAL racists, you can't use the same strategy as in the 60s now.

bob,

Psychological defences relate to people's identity being put under threat. The worse the implication you are making about the other person with your argument, the more certain it is that your argument will be rejected out of hand. You don't have to be explicitly attacking your opponent. For example, if you say "Trump isn't going to do any of the things he campaigned on, he's a con artist" the implication is very clear: if Trump is a con artist, then anyone who voted for him or likes him is a mark and an idiot. Your argument will therefore be summarily rejected. In fact, if you're talking with a supporter who deep down agrees that Trump is kind of full of **** and that he won't do a lot of what he says he will, the result will be to shift their thinking away from that. They will become more certain that Trump is fundamentally honest.

You could say instead in this instance something like "I don't trust him and I feel like he often just says what he thinks people want to hear. For instance he talked all the time in the campaign about prosecuting Clinton and now he's saying that was just a slogan and he doesn't care about it". Maybe not the best example but I'm making a point: This fundamentally is saying the same thing (Trump is a con artist) but it says it without the clear implication that the supporter is an idiot for believing him. It's also phrased in the concerns of the supporter, who probably thinks Clinton should be locked up. Plus, the supporter may not be aware of the fact you threw in there. Without the identity threat hanging over them they will be more open to new facts and may think "Oh... I thought he was going to prosecute her. Is he really not going to?". He might go look up information on it. The seed of the idea that Trump doesn't mean what he says may get planted.

The weird thing about political arguments is that weaker is better. "Trump is a pathological liar, here is a list of 800 things he has said that are bull****" is objectively a stronger argument than "He said he was going to prosecute Clinton and then dropped that the second he won, what gives?". But precisely because it is a stronger argument, and thus more challenging to the supporter's paradigm, it's more likely to be flatly rejected without even being considered.

tldr: Avoid at all costs making people choose between new facts and their ego. Ego wins that fight every single time.

My mom and I have an agreement. Of course I am failing on the FB front right now. But we will work it out.

But emotion trumps both, every single time.