Advice

On responding to a wingnut

My bro is over my head sometimes and I have no idea how to respond to this text. Can you please help me understand??

“Historically democracies die by suicide; by excesses of liberties, lack of virtue, by “values clarification” and multi-cultural relativism to a point that society disintegrates. For instance, the UN’s plan for civilian disarmament that is gradually being imposed upon the world. There is an implication that freedom has been attained and tyranny has been banished; an idea diametrically opposed to all of human history and therefore a dogma, a statement of faith. Incidentally in The Republic it is stated that tyranny, the offspring of democracy, takes his father’s place after having disarmed him.”

 

This isn’t over your head. It’s a bunch of jumbled nonsense. Here’s how you respond:

“Plato was wrong about tyranny, John Adams was wrong about democracy, and you are wrong about everything. There’s no such thing as “multi-cultural relativism.” There’s multiculturalism and there’s cultural relativism, neither of which cause any damage to democracy. Also, there is no UN plan for civilian disarmament. That’s a hoax. Stop letting ultra-conservative chain emails influence your already ridiculous world view. Pull your head out of your ass and check your fucking sources, because you sound like a methed-up tea party kook.”

Standard

8 thoughts on “On responding to a wingnut

  1. Sarah says:

    As someone with a wing-nut conservative (but also articulate, educated, and charismatic) brother, fucking thank you. Can I bring you to Thanksgiving with me, Coquette?

  2. archibald says:

    But Coke, haven’t you seen the FEMA concentration camps? If there are two organizations powerful and nefarious enough to enslave us, it’s the UN and FEMA.

  3. CL says:

    wow – its throwback Thursday for me – this word salad diatribe reminds me of undergraduate boys that used to shout/talk at me during poli-sci seminars because I was a vagina owning social liberal (still guilty on both counts) . My actual brother is also of this vein – political philosophy syllabus filtered through internet conspiracy paranoia. Of course Coquette is correct but my advice is to engage as little as possible with this nonsense that says little about reality and a lot about the speaker’s creeping fear that he is losing his “birth right” privilege to women/gays/others that he does not see as pure laine (sorry I’m Canadian). That is what code words like “lack of virtue” and “multicultural relativism” actually mean and the rest is just magical prestige to distract from this fact.

    • Perspectivator says:

      I was immediately transported back to Boston and hanging out with some MIT philosophy students. Yeah, failed engineers become philosophers. Some of the most unbearably boorish shit came out of their mouths. I was most offended when one of these guys started putting his girlfriend down for not being intellectual. I left before it became a point of honor. After he said, “You wouldn’t understand.” I was going to say something like, “There is literally no thought you can think that is useful to us if you can’t express it in a way we can understand.” Wow. This is really making me stew over that asshole. Totally forgot that guy.

      “If you haven’t read absolutely all of Berdiaev and Derrida, then we can’t have a meaningful conversation.”

      Me: If you can’t summarize your premise without academic citations, then philosophy is useless to every day life.

      But yeah, I’m still upset that philosofloozy fucked the pizza guy and not me.

  4. Richard says:

    This guys isn’t articulate or over anyone’s head at all. He’s just found the thesaurus function in word. /r/iamverysmart bullshit the whole way down. People like this are insufferable but they’re also hilarious because they don’t REALLY know what they’re saying so if you can actually respond they just kinda flubber around incoherently.

    • Anna says:

      Yaaas, I love engaging in these discussions, all you need to do to get these ppl riled up is match the proportion of three syllables or more words in a sentence.

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