If your opponent expresses an opinion, do your best to shoot it down immediately. Employ any of the below tactics:
- Hit and Run – attack your opponent with no substantiation, no facts, heck you don’t even have to use logic. Then walk away. Do not engage beyond your “hit”.
- Talk Over someone speaking with whom you disagree. Don’t wait to hear what they have to say. Don’t wait for them to stop talking or even take a breath. Talk over their speech, louder and more passionate.
- Personal Attacks. If you can’t win the argument, attack your opponent using personal attacks. Deflect the discussion away from the issue and make your opponent the issue.
- Bullying
- Name calling – giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence.
- Glittering generalities – the opposite of name calling.
- Card stacking – the selective use of facts and half-truths.
- Bandwagon – appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd.
- Plain folks – an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”.
- Transfer – carries over the authority, sanction, and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept.
- Testimonials – involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.
- Ignore it. If your opposition has questions that might hold you accountable, ignore them. Do not answer.
- Initiate Hate Speech
- Smear. If you can’t win the argument, concoct sexual improprieties of your opponent.
- Voice your opinion. Your opponent has no right to an opinion, but you do. Write Op-Ed pieces. The liberal press is sure to publish any dribble you write.
- If you opponent expresses an opinion, do your best to shoot it down immediately. Employ yelling, name calling, attack the person and employ emotion. The more emotion the better to cover up the fact that that you are not expressing any facts, logic or intelligence.
Kool-Aid Defined:
A reference to the 1978 cult mass-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Jim Jones, the leader of the group, convinced his followers to move to Jonestown. Late in the year he then ordered his flock to commit suicide by drinking grape-flavored Kool-Aid laced with potassium cyanide. In what is now commonly called “the Jonestown Massacre”, 913 of the 1100 Jonestown residents drank the Kool-Aid and died.
One lasting legacy of the Jonestown tragedy is the saying, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” This has come to mean, “Don’t trust any group you find to be a little on the kooky side.” or “Whatever they tell you, don’t believe it too strongly”. The Far Right, Far Left, most Liberals, and Social Progressives tend to fall into this category.
