[update]Oh, and please recommend, by the way. I'm getting great feedback from you guys! The more I get the better a job I can do!
Hi all! Long time, no see! Tomorrow I officially move my broker's license to a new company, which ...well, let's just say it cut into my free time. And by `cut into' I mean `utterly destroyed.'
I've also been asked by my publisher to make some revisions to the second half of my book. The first half is my own, personal story which they've said is fine. The second half was originally just an issue-by-issue refutation of all things dittiot, but my publisher has asked that I make it more of a dittohead conversational primmer, which I think is a fan-freaking-tastic idea. I'm calling it "How to talk to a Dittohead (and you must)" because, let's face it guys, if we don't do it who else will? Is Brit Hume suddenly going to spontaneously spring a soul and say "I can't do this anymore...this is all a bunch of crap!"
From the dittohead's perspective any argument is like a big Plinko game. Remember Plinko from the Price is Right? If you've never seen it, Plinko was basically a 10-foot tall pegboard. Contestants would drop a disk about the size of a small Frisbee somewhere along the top, and the disk would bounce its way down the board to the bottom. Along the bottom were about 10 slots with dollar amounts ranging from as little as $100 to as much as $10,000. You took home whatever dollar amount your chip landed on, but not all of the slots paid off. On either side of the $10,000 slot were a pair of $0 slots, so if you went for the big prize you'd often go home with nothing.
Plinko is the perfect parallel to arguing with a dittohead, except there's only one hopper that pays off, and the other nine are worth nothing. Whenever you start the conversation, you're picking your spot along the top of the board to drop your chip. The dittohead will then do everything in his or her power to filter that chip into one of the zero dollar hoppers. The point of the discussion from the dittohead's perspective is to guide you into one of those slots where it's easy to ignore what you're saying.
Well, I'm trying to identify as many of those zero dollar slots as I can. Those casual dismissals that they all use to turn an otherwise complicated argument into an exchange of talking points. Here are the one's I could come up with off the top of my head...
1) "You're answer to everything is `raise taxes.'"
2) "You're just another big-government, tax-and-spend liberal."
3) "And you believe what you hear from the liberal media?"
4) "You just hate Bush."
5) "Yeah, but that was Clinton's fault (or, Clinton didn't do anything about it, either.)"
I'm sure I'll think of dozens of others, but I figured I might as well try to rack everyone's collective brain rather than just rattling around the small change in my own. Once I have a good collection of these, I'll be able to address ways of getting around each dead end. Thanks in advance to anyone who helps!