Responding to Polemical Arguments

[snarkyman]

Those of you who have been long time readers of my blog know that from time to time, I publish responses to items emailed to me by my family. The two preceding times I've posted these responses to LiveJournal, I did not have the courage to actually send the response.

I've been doing a bit of thinking about if, or possibly, how to respond to the current flood of bogus arguments, polemical misstatements and general BS that's been spouting out my the email from members of my own family.

I've already responded to the blatantly false internet lie (Urban Legend? Hoax?) about Ollie North and Osama bin Laden titled "Lest we Forget".

http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/Oliver_North.shtml
"*The facts: *Oliver North testified about a home security system during a July 7, 1987 joint Senate-House hearing on the Iran-Contra investigation. The questioner was not a senator, but committee counsel John Nields. Col. North testified the security system was installed because threats were made on his life by terrorist Abu Nidal."

Now I'm considering what to say, if anything, about The Future of Texas and how GWB can retire there and how The Republic of Texas secede from the US. You can read about it here:
http://www.houstonbeats.com/board/showthread.php?t=29544

I also have a misguided piece from my dad about Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law about the temporary nature of democracy and how it's the Democrat's fault. It's actually sounds like a reasonable argument, up to the point where everything is blamed on those receiving social services - but says nothing about the large corporations and their influence in the government. It's also completely bogus.

http://www.hamline.edu/law/facadmin/olson.shtml
DISCLAIMER: There is an e-mail floating around the internet dealing with the 2000 Bush/Gore election, remarks of a Scotish philosopher named Alexander Tyler, etc. Part of it is attributed to me. It is entirely BOGUS as to my authorship. I've been trying to kill it for 3 years. For details see: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp

So the question I have for all of you is this: Should I bother responding to such drek? If so, how? I'm sure some actually consider themselves thoughtful. But they don't bother doing the proper fact checking. Honestly, I'm tired, I don't want to do it, but somehow feel compelled to respond.

I guess the problem is that they're conservative Republicans and I'm not. It's kind of like teaching a pig to sing - It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Personally, I'd send a polite and concise but clear correction of the errors. This is potentially a lot of work (since it doesn't stop them from sending you the drek), but might possibly help instill a little bit of doubt, and doubt is the very most important element in the upcoming election. Every small tick away from the hard right (even to the extent of making the people who are voting Republican anyway push it less aggressively at others) helps in such a tight race.

Then again, this is easy for me to say: my family is, by and large, to my left, so this isn't the kind of argument I typically have with them...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I have a cousin who is the stereotypical "AOL STUPID EMAIL REPOSTER". (I mean, down to the capitalization, never trimming headers, huge broadcast list in the To: field....)

I kept refuting her wild claims with Snopes - and slowly but surely that became my job. Now she posts the same stuff to the same people, but asks me to correct it. (:-)

[snarkyman.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd send a polite and concise but clear correction of the errors.

That's what I've been doing, but honestly, I'm tired and I don't want to do it any more.

I have better things to be doing with my time.