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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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If they are a friend or otherwise convinceable, you do it by being more confident than them and generally being the person they go to for an informed opinion that they will adopt for themselves. Get them into a mindset where they might ask you how you know so many things so you can hit them with a reading rec they'll ignore for the next 4 months (but then they might actually read it!).
If they are combative, you endeavor to not take them seriously (again, confidence) and demonstrate your knowledge with specifics without suggesting that you're actually taking anything they say seriously. Your hope with these people is that they shut the fuck up and slowly internalize on their own timeline so that if they come around like 2 years later, they think it was their own idea. The other goal is that the primary audience for what you're saying is everyone else, who will see you implicitly denigrating the other person's bullshit while having a wealth of facts and confidence.
If someone is particularly bad, you can dunk on them. Some people need to be socially policed right then and there (e.g. people being racist, transphobic, classist) and a decent number will even course-correct shortly after. Keep in mind that a decent number will flip their shit, so prioritize your own safety.
It is very rare that you'll find someone that is both combative and willing to change their opinion in real time through discussion.
I recommend demonstrating respect if you want to avoid making someone feel insulted
I suppose it depends on your goal. My advice is indeed based on alienating them to some extent. If you want something from them, you'd want to change your approach accordingly.
I've seen folks go the respect route against combative people speaking from a place of ignorance. When you want something from them and it's in an isolated environment, it can work to get what you want, basically through manipulation. When it's in a more communal space, it seems to usually backfire. The person is "handled" for a while but they will be alienated anyways if your opinion holds sway. If, instead, they get a foothold, they tend to become insufferable bullies.
I've seen good leftists hounded out of spaces by people like this, liberals they were trying to be nice and respectful to. They should be thoroughly opposed unless you're trying to extract something from them.
Obviously bad actors get cast out, and I'm not saying to do civility fetishism or indeed even manipulation. Being a socialist means, to some extent, believing in people, and I think it's a better way to relate to the world to view people as generally being genuinely worthy of respect rather than merely condescending to speak gently to them to lull them to sleep. There is a lot that you can learn from people, and indeed a lot that you must learn from them if you wish to help them. Education is fundamentally a cooperative process between teacher and student wherein they resolve a succession of problems together. Simply dictating someone's new ideology to them is very unlikely to produce anything good in the long run, and viewing yourself as above them and as having the luxury to skate along at a different level while pretending to respect them is liable to get you fucked over as your superficiality and disingenuousness become apparent.
Okay but again we're talking about someone who's being combative from a place of basically complete ignorance. You don't have to throw out the concept of radicalization through education to shut down people acting in this way. They are not in a mindset to listen nor to interpret a softer touch as anything but validation. When you want something from them, you're giving them validation (manipulating them) to get it. Otherwise, they are highly likely to move ahead unchecked and fuck things up for you and those around you.
Being respectful to that person's ideas communicates to everyone what the acceptability discourse is. It communicates an extent of condoning it, even. Like, "people can respectfully disagree, that's a good point with similar validity".
I have never, ever seen that lead to good outcomes.
There is a big difference between having respect for a person and having respect for their ideas. Someone can have completely contemptible ideas and still be a good and worthy person in fact, this is common. We should neither engage in faux-respect for reactionary bullshit nor try to convince ourselves that it actually should be respected. What we should do is try to have understanding with our fellow people and make sure that we maintain an awareness that even if they are wrong and we are right in some matters, there is still a lot that they have to teach us, and though we might guess at some aspects of how their error came to be, to really understand its source probably requires hearing about it from them.
There will be no difference perceived between disrespecting a person's ideas, i.e. not taking them seriously, and them feeling disrespected. My suggestion was to not take them seriously (the person who knows nothing but is being combative). To treat them as of they're raising a point that does not deserve respect or really much engagement, and that it's important to project this so that (1) they are not emboldened and (2) your actual audience, which is everyone else, understands that it's not a serious idea to be considered.
Also, you are much less likely to learn from a person behaving this way than you are to find that you must suddenly deal with disruption and bullying because you didn't clearly set boundaries and quash the ridiculous behaviors. It's great to learn from people, but you should prioritize doing so in a way that is productive.
I see a lot of folks on the left zero in on disruptive or reactionary people, thinking they'll turn them around or that they need to give them some special attention for the sake of "resolving" contention in a given space. This ends up wasting their time and often everyone's time while the contention is prolonged and the problematic individual fails to improve (after all, they're being taken seriously). This will put a strain on others involved as well, as rather than alienating the problematic individual you are now creating more situations for everyone else to become alienated. It's also just plain the least efficient way to learn and adapt and should only be done for strategic reasons, not as a rule.
Also... there are many people that have nothing at all to teach us except that we should isolate and avoid them. You are not going to find a valuable learning moment from the cryptofascist harassing every brown woman in the office. People that choose to spend their time trying to respect the cryptofascist to empathize with them and create a better project are going to be counterproductive, full stop. Make the space workable for the brown women and police the cryptofascist's behaviors.
Hmm, I think I took Maoo to mean confident in a flippant way, I suppose that makes it disrespectful. The situation I thought it would be appropriate is like, for a person who is unaccustomed to being challenged or who very gassed up. But I think you're right generally, only in the instances where you can't be respectful it might work to not take them too seriously.