The futility of arguing with MAGGATS; a rant

[robbob]

Last edited Sat Apr 27, 2024, 07:49 PM - Edit history (3)

Just got finished with an online back and forth that left me very frustrated. Here’s the thing; it wasn’t even about politics! I recently got sucked into following an online forum called Quora. Topics about anything under the sun come to my inbox at least 5 times every day linking to stories like “How did you confront your bully”, or “Why did Trump say…”, or “what’s the strangest thing a teacher ever did in the classroom?”. I usually delete the political ones; too many trolls and nut jobs, and I delete a lot of repetitive topics (rudest celebrity, most inconsiderate houseguest, etc.), but invariably I get sucked in. It’s a real time waster.

So, under “strangest thing a teacher has done” there was a story of a nun who went around the class showing the kids a picture of the pope and asking them who it was. However, the author wrote their description of this in a very confusing way, something like: “the teacher wanted the students to reply to the question who is this, showing them a picture of the pope, with God…”. Yeah, where’s an editor when you need them? I had to read it twice before I understood that the nun was trying to get the kids to identify the pope as being God.

So someone who was obviously confused asked why would they have depictions of the pope with God, and I took it upon myself to clarify the poorly worded statement, explaining that it wasn’t a picture of the “pope with God”, rather they wanted the question “who is this” answered “with” the word “God”. This distinction was made pretty clear in the rest of the posted story, but I thought my post was obvious; I was just making a grammatical clarification.

Of course, being a joker I couldn’t resist adding “come to think of it though, you never see a picture of the two of them together. Hmm…🤔”.

So a couple of hours later an email arrives from Quora informing me “Bruno” had replied to my post saying “what you have written is complete nonsense”. Now, I recognized this user and knew he was MAGA, and a Biden hating Gish-galloper, but this wasn’t a political argument, so I looked at my post and figured maybe he didn’t get my joke. I replied “It’s a joke, Bruno. You know, like Superman and Clark Kent, you never see them together?”. And I think I even described it as a dumb joke.

Well, a few hours later I get another reply. Of course he got my “joke”, it’s an old joke. The nonsense was how I just regurgitated (his word) the story about the nun and the pope, and how no Catholic believes the pope is god, so stop repeating such nonsense. And he would send my a “humour for dummies” joke book for Christmas.

So very politely I explained that I was responding the the poster who was confusing “the pope, with God” and the OP’s intended meaning (the students were supposed to answer the question with the WORD God). Well, apparently that wasn’t good enough. Bruno came back with another condescending reply, as follows:

“What the OP wrote was nonsense. You regurgitated it without any analysis or caveat so you wrote nonsense. If you struggle with that logic, that's your problem, not mine. The weak ‘joke’ did not make up for it. Thank you and Goodbye.”

He also blocked me, so I couldn’t reply further. This blind refusal to distinguish between someone commenting on a dubious story, and someone trying to clear up a grammatically ambiguous sentence struck me as so typically MAGA. The OP’s story was offensive to him (imagine, a nun saying the pope was God!!! 🙄 ), so somebody commenting on the poor way in which the story was told must also be guilty. And no amount of explaining would have changed his mind, and so offended was he at my attempt to explain my point (I had absolutely ZERO opinion of the veracity of the original story) that he then blocks any further discussion.

Anyway, rant over. This is why I won’t argue with MAGGATS; they have an opinion, anyone who disagrees is wrong and offends them, and in the end they’ll stick their fingers in their eyes and start yelling “I can’t hear you!!!!” rather then admit or concede even the smallest misunderstanding on their part about what you are saying.

Thanks for listening to this rather long story…

[erronis]

1. Don't waste your time on quora

Or other scavengers, aggregators.

I did start getting notices about subjects that I was interested in (computer science stuff) but it totally got out of control. I now must have 200-300 sites on my scam/ignore list because everyone is doing the same thing.

[B.See]

2. Take it from me. Your time would've been better spent

arguing with a fkn ROCK. That's speaking from a LOT of experience.

[DontBelieveEastisEas]

3. At least a rock will occasionally change sides.

And if the rock is well traveled, it gets less edgy; it invariably becomes more well rounded.

If a Magat could be reasoned with, I don't think they would still be a Magat.
It's a proof of concept, that there is a futility of arguing with them.