Tactics

From a Neoneocon commenter:

Perhaps more productive is to plant the seed of doubt/thought in the fertile soil between their ears, and let it go at that.

One example is turning leftist viewpoints back on one’s interlocutor apparently without noticing the conflict, viz., if talking to a liberal physician, go on a tear about how Obama’s absolutely right that doctors yank out body parts just to turn a buck, and that you for one are glad that Obama (keep using His name) has had the courage to punish such parasites and cut back their income. It’s for the children!

Other examples include:

1. Talking up militant unionism to anyone who has to (or in some future development, may have to) deal with them.

2. To a liberal mom holding forth about her child’s performance in school, talk about how the Dems are absolutely right that grades are elitist and merely reflective of class advantages, that her child should be sent to an inner city school to learn about the downtrodden, and that since all children are equally valuable they should therefore all receive the same grade. (If anything brings out the hard-nosed side of most women, it’s something that disadvantages their children. And quite right, too.)

3. To a liberal dad who’s proud of his son, talk up homosexuality, and tell him you agree that all children should be taught the …uh…ins and outs of all the myriad “lifestyles” Dems support, and encouraged to try them all. If he’s proud of a daughter, talk about how you approve of abortion without parental consent, and think that the Dems are right to support illegitimate births among teen-aged girls.

4. To accusations of “Islamophobia,” from a liberal who is female, Jewish, homosexual, or a non-believer, extol the virtues of Islam, and speak approvingly of Islamic policies toward the group to which your interlocutor belongs. (”No, no, I admire Islam. They sure know how to keep their ________ in line, don’t they? We could learn a lot from them.”)

5. To union members, talk about how you approve of the Dem’s environmental policies. “Barack’s right, we must preserve the environment for the spotted howling cockroach, no matter how many jobs are lost. Losing blue-collar jobs is a small price to pay for seeing the cockroaches gambol merrily in a pristine habitat.”

6. To someone who makes a lot of money, talk about how everything over some sum (choose, say, 70% of the guy’s annual income) should be confiscated in taxes and given to the poor. He’s got so much, they’ve got so little. It’s not fair!

7. Car buff? Government Motors should produce only strictly utilitarian transport (Trabants!) They’re good enough for the proletariat.

You get the idea. Dem policies have a thousand cleavage planes in them, because they’ve cobbled together a whole bunch of groups that have mutually exclusive views. Jam the person’s face in the part that’s repellent to him, but act as though you presume he – as a Dem – will agree. The hard part is keeping a straight face.

Additionally, just for fun, with people who don’t know my actual views, I sometimes like to use psychic ju-jitsu; express agreement, and then go progressively (sorry) even further left to titrate their views, ending up waxing eloquent about policies that would make Karl Marx squirm. (Think Kim Jong Il’s press secretary and you’ve got the idea.) The trick is to see how far you can go without the other person realizing that you’re engaging in parody. It’s amusing to watch initial smiles of agreement slowly slip, and even more so if they start arguing a more conservative line.