Just something MAGA-people seem to have a hard time with sometimes. Probably not as much when Americans are speaking to themselves, but as a non-American, sometimes it’s challenging to get “those people” to admit that there is indeed anything wrong with the US. As in they won’t accept a single criticism, and will loudly proclaim “America is the greatest country in the world”, while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, which for me pretty explicitly means America isn’t great, if it has to be made to be such again.
The tantrums are just them admitting that they don’t have a real response.
Yeah, yeah it is.
But what do you do when someone in a position of power over you has a tantrum and refuses to use common sense…?
in a position of power over you has a tantrum and refuses to use common sense…?
Oh lord. This is not how you approach thinking about anything remotely like this if you actually want to change someone’s beliefs.
Belittling them and their beliefs, no matter how deserving, is nearly guaranteed to just piss them off and not do much more. It doesn’t read as an attack on misguided beliefs, it will read to them as an attack on them and their own decision making/reasoning skills. Because you probably are internally thinking “what the fuck is wrong with you” and it probably come through to them loud and clear.
If it’s your boss, stop fucking talking politics at work. Not tomorrow, not now, yesterday. No, you don’t get a pass for correcting the abysmally wrong. Just shut the fuck up about politics and keep your head down. Work is for making a paycheck so you can survive, not for making an idealogical stand. If they keep trying to talk politics to you and won’t allow you to disengage, start looking for a new job. HR is not your friend and are most likely going to side with the more senior position, or at least will let it slip that you complained to them, making your job even more hell. Just cut your losses. Either get your shit together to be able to work around it, get a number of people together to all lodge the same complaint so it’s more costly for HR to ignore you than it is for them to, or find someplace else asap.
If it’s your parents or family, just avoid the fucking subject for as long as you are reliant on them for anything. If they won’t shut up about it, learn to “grey rock” or just smile and nod. Redirect. Change the subject. Do anything except try to meet them head on and “win” the argument. That’s not how conversations work in regards to convincing people of things, especially when there are strong feelings attached.
It is not your job to correct people’s misguided beliefs. The people who argue that it’s your duty to speak up whenever and wherever you can… they live a life that is either significantly divorced from reality, insulated by living surrounded entirely with like minded individuals, they are slowly alienating those around them, or they are only so outspoken online. Your first priority is to just get by, hopefully avoiding unneeded conflict in your daily life.
And before all the people come out of the fucking woodwork with extreme hypotheticals… Yes, if your boss or parent is literally using racial slurs, that changes things. If things are more extreme than some asshole just blabbing out their dumbass beliefs, re-evaluate. All I’ve said is under the assumption that the shit you’re complaining about is mainly just people talking stupid shit.
People don’t work like some sort of fucking debate club where you can beat them over the head with facts, logic, and gotchas until they submit and see things your way. It’s a very addictive thing to convince yourself that they do, but they overwhelmingly don’t
If it’s your boss, stop fucking talking politics at work.
I live in a country where I people can’t be fired over “talking politics” at work. A boss isn’t too much in a position of power, depending on the job. This is because here in Finland, we have regulation.
I’m an adult. Why would my family be in a “position of power” over me?
“It is not your job to correct people’s misguided beliefs”
So if a cop broke your rights because they got mad at you for making them have a tantrum and use an excuse to arrest you, you’d allow them and apologize and not do anything about it, since “it’s not your job” to correct the cops misguided belief that they were in the right to arrest you over simply having offended them?
If you’re in politics, and you’re in a session and the speaker has a tantrum, what do you do?
If you’re an American a few years ago, your president was Donald Trump, a drooling, diaper-wearing senior who can’t parse sentences together and refuses to believe in well established facts. That’s a deluded, misguided, and willfully ignorant man as the president, which I would consider a position of power (over the people in his nation, not me, as again, not American.)
You wouldn’t think it’s perhaps in the interest of greater society to not have people like that in positions of power?
People don’t work like some sort of fucking debate club
Oh gee whiz, kind internet-stranger, thanks for the words of wisdom, I never would’ve thought that otherwise.
Or perhaps I’m making conversation here about this subject you think you know so well.
Have a gander: https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/
“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”
