Sometimes, you get into an exchange with someone who is trying as hard as they can to justify themselves. The effort is there, but the capacity is not.

What does one do when they are arguing against someone who is plainly an idiot?

I can tell you what I do. Normally, it’s not a great idea to share from your own playbook, but I think that this approach is so effective, that the benefit to be had outweighs the setback that comes from putting it out there.

When I argue against an idiot, what I do is I allow them to take the floor. I ask them to explain their position, and allow them to spend as much time as they wish to do so. But as for me, my participation in the exchange is minimal.

This works well due to the misconception that if only one person is participating, then the one person who is contributing wins by default. That very assumption is simply not true.

Simply put: The more time a fool spends with his mouth open, the greater the potential for him to put his foot right in it.

Because you’re allowing the idiot to ramble on and on, you’re giving him more opportunity to slip up. There’s no need to call him out on it, either. The foolishness of their position and every blunder that they make are all immediately evident to anyone who is of at least average intelligence.

And what makes this work so well is the fact that, when you allow an idiot to speak to his heart’s content, he’ll think you’re doing him a favor.

When you allow idiots to argue long enough, you tend to notice a few things about them. For one thing, they tend to be characterized by illusory superiority. From what I’ve seen, they tend to be proud of whatever accolades they have, such as a college education. Most of us know that the hard part of most degrees is paying back loans afterwards, and most college programs amount to just showing up and wiping from front to back. Yet, an idiot would proudly boast of their accomplishments in an obvious effort to validate their superiority.

They also tend to appeal to authority quite a bit. Often times, they’ll think that their position is the pro-science position, and assume that any idea that’s scientific (by their reasoning of how science works) must be universally accepted by anyone who is of a sound mind. In many cases, they’ll get their “scientific” ideas by reading about studies on some content-aggregator website, not aware that what data that was trickled down to them was what made it through the filter of the aggregator’s biases.

They’ll let other people do the legwork for them, unaware that they’re merely being served a narrative under the guise of science.

Another thing you’ll notice about them is that they tend to simultaneously hold conflicting viewpoints. That’s not that unusual for people, but the nature of the conflict tends to be more egregious among those who think too highly of their own brilliance.

A notorious example is among intersectional feminists. They claim that they are about women’s liberation, but at the same time, they insist that all women do things their way. If a person insists that an entire category of people must march in lock-step with them because they believe that their ideas are better, they’re not about liberation, at all.

In other cases, it’s the ironic atheist who fancies herself a non-mystic, has plenty to say about your religion, but still attends dormroom seances and checks her daily horoscopes.

Another way that an idiot shows their hand is through psychological projection. This is particularly the case among the intersectionalists, or really just about anyone who tends to assume that the worst qualities are an innate feature among all human beings.

Often, the idiot would assume that if given the opportunity to commit a crime and get away with it, most people would go ahead and commit the crime. When you understand how idiots tend to project their shortcomings onto others, it becomes clear that the idiot is revealing more about themselves than other people. This is particularly revealing when it comes to the people who assume that people are inherently racist, or, more alarming still, those who believe that humans are rapists by nature. And it pretty much tells you what you need to know about those who believe that strangers are child-abuse waiting to happen.

What they fail to comprehend is that not everyone has their sensibilities, and the real problem is with themselves, and not so much with the people that they observe.

As I’ve pointed out before, those who virtue-signal the hardest usually do so with a guilty conscience, often because they themselves have committed the crime they speak so vociferously against.

There’s an expression: Never correct your enemy when they are making a mistake. In time, you learn to recognize those who err the most (and the hardest). In many cases, they’ll attempt to speak over you. But what they don’t realize is that, when you allow them to do so, you’re really not doing them any favors.

The surest way to expose a fool is to permit him to speak.

Sometimes, someone says the most obvious thing, and it’s just what everyone needs to hear. In this case, it’s former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, in an interview with Fox News.

Yes, Fox News, the program that impressionable morons teach other impressionable morons to piss all over, because it might expose them to ideas that aren’t their own.

On Fox Business, Brouillette points out that it’s better to have more than one source of energy, which may even include non-renewables:

Within days of taking the President’s seat, Joe Biden pulled the plug on the Keystone Pipeline, putting 11,000 people out of work, because his idea of pursuing renewable energy is destroying what’s established while work on alternatives is still underway.

As if it weren’t already obvious that this was a stupid strategic move, Texas is paying the price for its over-dependence on wind power after having seen its wind turbines freeze during a winter storm. It gets worse: while many Texans are still without power, another winter storm threatens the state.

While leftists might just make Biden out to be a victim of poor timing, Texans are the greater victims of left-wing ideas.

Don’t get me wrong, I think renewable energy sounds great. However, it’s implementation should be strategic, which may even take the admission that fossil fuels may be the most practical choice for a little while.

Environmentalists like to say that there’s a lot at stake. But if that’s the case, then all the more reason to take a more deliberate, thoughtful approach. Surgery is performed with a scalpel, not a battle axe.

It’s already apparent to most of us that Islamic terrorists are on the wrong side of things. But if they are the type of religious folk that are dim enough to consider coincidences to be signs, these past few days would give many of their kind pause for thought.

Days ago, ISIS held a training class on how to make bombs. But just because they held a training class doesn’t mean that they know what they’re doing. A class went wrong when a bomb detonated, killing 21 of them. And because the blast alerted authorities to their presence, another 23 of them were arrested.

Not enough schadenfreude? Mere days later, a Taliban bomb-making class also went wrong, lightening the world by thirty incompetent terrorists.

The cultures of both groups are characterized by a certain grim fatalism flavored by overly-legalistic religion, and they had every intention on killing other people with their craft, which makes it kinda hard to feel bad for them.

According to their theology, had they died while actively engaged with an enemy, each of them would have been treated to 72 virgins in paradise. Doing the math, a product of 3,672 virgins would have missed out on the opportunity to perform favors for a small group of cave-dwelling fanatics.

If being religious to you means making financial decisions based on things like the contents of fortune cookies, that’s just stupid. But if you decide not to become an Islamic terrorist because they’re accidentally blowing themselves up out of hilarious incompetence, then you obviously think too hard to join the world’s deadliest flat-earthers.

If at first you don’t succeed, keep chugging away at what resulted in failure. That seems to be Disney’s approach with Star Wars.

Sariah Wilson has announced on Twitter that Rian Johnson’s trilogy of Star Wars films is happening:

This news comes days after Disney fired Gina Carano for having a non-establishment opinion. That in itself was a poor choice, which makes the Rian Johnson announcement seem like a poor attempt at damage control. But it doesn’t make the situation any better for Star Wars, because the fans don’t want Rian Johnson making another Star Wars film, in light of the disaster that was The Last Jedi.

The indications we have so far is that Rian Johnson’s trilogy won’t involve the “legacy” characters. If his stories were to take place in a separate galaxy, then perhaps we can take relief in knowing that Johnson can’t do much more damage to the established material.

By Johnson’s own admission, things like world-building don’t interest him. That’s really a shame, because that’s one of the finer elements of writing. That also makes him the kind of person you wouldn’t want directing a Star Wars film, and certainly not a trilogy of them.

If you’ve cancelled your subscription to Disney Plus, it seems like your timing was great!

Parler had spent about a month offline, due to Amazon falsely accusing them of wrongdoing. But now the platform is back online.

Please check it out, and start an account, if you have not done so, already.

I’m on Parler too, so please follow me there, if you feel so inclined.

If you want to know who has control over you, find out who you are not allowed to criticize.