Dealing With Leftists And Other Barbarians

There's a great article over at Takimag offering advice on how to deal with leftists, i.e., brainwashed masses of people who viciously defend pre-packaged ideas that they refuse to analyze or discuss. From the article [some frank language]:

Try as I may, all the evidence suggests we are on the brink of an ideological Dark Age the likes of which America has never seen. It seems we’re only inches away from living in a world where stating the obvious will be criminalized.

Online, the chief enablers of this situation are the smirking young progtards, who are unwilling to even touch any viewpoint that hasn’t been spoon-fed to them in school or beamed into their eyeballs via TV. Their brains have never hatched a single original idea in their lives. They are mere hollow carriers of infectious ideas, not so much Trojan horses as little pink Trojan ponies. . . .

Bandwagon-riders that they are, they tell everyone who doesn’t think in lockstep with them to “Get with the times,” which is a dishonest way of saying, “Be a conformist like I am.” Hence their smugness as they tilt at windmills that were destroyed generations ago. They are still deluded that they are fighting the power rather than working for it—often without pay or benefits.

It’s one thing to be unwittingly brainwashed, yet quite another to assent to one’s brainwashing once it’s been made clear. These hateful little fuckers are defiantly brainwashed, and whether it’s cognitive dissonance or doublethink or pathological lying, they’ve made it impossible to rationally engage with them. Believe me, I’ve tried. For decades. Honestly. Foolishly.

Just try to have a civilized debate with such a person about any number of topics ranging from abortion, affirmative action, feminism, government spending, the environment, immigration, etc., and see what happens. They will not engage in rational discourse, but rather will attack you. The article goes on to recommend abandoning rational discourse with such people, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Those of you who are civilized need to remember something: leftists and other barbarians view your civility as weakness. You must either avoid them entirely, or engage them on their terms (i.e., without mercy). There are fewer and fewer places left to run away to; at some point, when your back is up against the wall, you're going to have to fight back.

EDIT:

It just occurred to me that in leftist thought, as it were, there is no such thing as objective truth -- everything is merely a clash of competing interests, and truth is nothing more than an artificial construct meant to keep people down. Why should any of us who acknowledge truth and its various branches (honor, reason, justice, mercy, etc.) give the benefit of them to such creatures?