I just hafta share this with ya'll. Cracked me up this mornin.
Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
By Matthew Barnes
May 28, 2009 | Issue 45•22
I…I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems
to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do
now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and—oh, no! For the
love of God, no! It's thoughtfully mulling things over!
Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!
Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem
rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue
at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one
flawed point to the next!
All together now! Put every bit of secondhand conjecture into it you've got!
Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own
unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound
tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for
it. C'mon…c'mon…yes, it's going for it! Now hit it with the thing that
one guy told us once while it's distracted by our ludicrous
rationalizations!
Gah! It's calmly and evenhandedly deflecting everything we're throwing
at it. Our deductive fallacies are only making it stronger! Wait…what
on earth is it doing now? Oh, no, it has sources! My God, it's
defending itself with ironclad sources! Someone stop the citing!
Please, please stop the citing!
The language is impenetrable! For all that is good and holy, backpedal
with all your might!
Where are the children? Someone overprotect the children! They cannot
be exposed to this kind of illuminative reasoning. Their young, open
minds are much too vulnerable to independent thought. We have to
shield them behind our unshakeable intolerance for critical thinking.
What?!? Noooooooooo! Richard! For the love of God, it's convinced Richard!
No time for tears now. Richard's mind has been changed forever. But we
mustn't let it weaken our resolve. Mark my words, our ignorance will
hold, no matter the cost. Now, more than ever, we have to keep
floundering ahead with blind faith in our increasingly fallacious
worldview.
For Richard's sake.
What's that? Now it's making an appeal to reason? Never! Do you hear
me, you eloquent, well-read behemoth? Never! We'll die before we
recognize what we secretly know to be true! The cognitive dissonance
only makes our denial stronger!
We have but one hope left: passive-aggressive slights disguised as
impersonal discourse.† Okay, everyone, careful now…careful…if this is
going to work, we have to arrogantly assume that it won't be smart
enough to catch on to our attempt to salvage some feeling of
superiority and—oh, God, it's calling us out! Quick, avoid eye contact
and stammer an apology! Tell it we were just joking! Tell it we were
joking!
Arrgh! Our pride! Oh, Lord, our pride! It burns!
All is lost. We don't stand a chance against its relentless onslaught
of exhaustive research and immaculate rhetoric. We may as well lie
down and—Christ, how it pains me to say it—admit that it's right. My
friends, I would like to take these last few moments of stubborn
close-mindedness to say that it's been an honor to dig myself into
this hole with you.
Unless…wait, of course! Why didn't we think of it before? Volume!
Sheer volume! It's so simple. Quickly now, we don't have much time!
Don't let it get a word in edgewise! Derisively cut it off
mid-sentence! Now, launch the sophomoric personal attacks! Louder,
yes, that's it, louder! Be repetitive, juvenile, and obstinate! It's
working! It's working!
We've done it! It's walking away and shaking its head in disgust!
Huzzah! Finally—defeated with a single three-minute volley of
irrelevant, off-topic shouting!
Ironic, really, isn't it?