Also, I note for the record that pretty much the last job I want is “apologist for Patrick’s style of argumentation”. Many other good reasons aside, my house is a little too glass, you know?

My plan is to take PNH’s comment (or at least my interpretation of it) to heart and try to make sure when I bitch that I’m not at the same time writing off a bunch of people. Or at least that when I do it’s only occasional, and that I acknowledge it as a guilty pleasure.

My take on Patrick’s comment–and I could be reading it wrong–is that there is a distinction between “Damn it, how can you be so ignorant as to not see this!” and “You are so stupid you are never going to be capable of understanding this.” The important distinction there is that the first case is theoretically correctable and the second one isn’t. Number one leads you to argue for education, debate, and open media. Number two leads you to argue for a class of empowered elites and class of marginalized masses. However you see the current situation, I would argue that the direction you want to push in is the first one. (And that’s the change in me since my 20s–back then I wanted to be in the empowered elite. Now I want everyone to be empowered citizens.)

That being said, it’s sometimes hard to maintain optimism when you see things like ass-gluing outweighing what’s happening in the Middle East, or when you read about how half the U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD, I have to admit. And pointing out that these people are stupid is definitely still fun! (And yes, I realise that I just quoted “some survey showing that a majority of those questioned had been soft-headed enough to believe a lie they’d been told by someone in authority”. Heh.)

There’s no question the Big Lie works, but does that mean we write off the people it works on, or that we redouble our efforts to make people it won’t work on? At some level it’s either “keep trying” or “give up”, and I’m not ready to give up on that many people just yet.