are they vietnamese, because vietnamese are hardocre right wingers for the most part(the older ones)? many of them get alot of government handouts.

After becoming more familiar with sociopathy (or "antisocial personality disorder" per the DSM) I've been wondering if a lot of what I had attributed to various personality traits among family members is perhaps instead an untreatable genetic disorder.

That's the neat part:

YOU FUCKING DON'T

You can’t. A person must choose to value objective truth. Likewise, they must choose to change their minds.

The book The Authoritarians by Dr. Bob Altemeyer covers this topic well. Some people compartmentalize to support their preferred foregone conclusions, and will dismiss absolutely anything that conflicts with their desired conclusions. They cannot and will not compare the things they have compartmentalized if it threatens their outlook.

Dr. Altemeyer points out that you cannot get through to people like that, no matter what. The only way to reduce their compartmentalized and authoritarian tendencies is through direct and prolonged exposure to diversity. This does not change the compartmentalization or predisposition to force their will on others, violently if necessary, it simply curbs them slightly. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, as they say.

I don't. It's never worked. I try really hard to not say, "That's the stupidest fucking shit I've heard since the last time I came here."

I once got my very pro-Trump very Christian aunt to agree that Trump wasn't Christian and that many of the things he's done go against Christian teachings.

By the next day, she was already posting tons of pro-Trump garbage on social media again. Because that's what compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance mean.

And she had built so much of her identity around this billionaire grifter that she was unable to change.

I don't know what the best way is to deal with these types of people, but in my case, I just completely cut her out of my life. There doesn't seem to be any purpose to communicating with a person who is incapable of learning.

Avoid the ones who have a chip on their shoulder and vote out of revenge. Discard these assholes from your life. They are the ones who would swallow acid if they thought it would make even a remote impact on dems. They are a lost cause.

Target the ones who don’t care or just single issue vote. These are the swing voters that make up the bulk. If these people were challenged a bit harder on their position this would have completely melted the support trump had. These are your “leopards eating face” peeps

Stop tellung them things and start asking questions.

"Will the medicaid stuff still be there? The budget cuts are pretry steep, is that still going to work?"

"Do you worry about people with green cards being detained? Is it going to spread? He is already talkimg about taking away people's citizenship. Is there anything we should do to be more prepared?"

When you don't attack but instead question with an eye toward a shared outcome, you can make more progress.

First thing to realise is that people only repair dissonance alone and in private. As you say, debates and arguments don't help.

I just try to engage on the positive topics and not engage on the negative ones. I'm honest about why I think what I think, but I don't try to convince anyone. I say when I don't know something. I don't make shit up that I can be proved wrong about, even if that means letting something go unchallenged.

You won't convince people that something they see as a problem isn't a problem, but what you might be able to do is get people to look at alternative solutions. People don't want to be brutal and uncaring, but they that can get there when it's their last option.

Then occasionally you get a "something you said stuck with me" several days later, or maybe you don't but something did stick with them. They incorporate the idea Into their thinking and start slowly shifting.

The best way, IME, is to know exactly in which ways these people are mistaken so you can ask the right questions until they're eventually left with untenable conclusions/information that doesn't fit reality. And it definitely helps if you state at all times that you're worried about the person, that you're not doing this because someone's paying you or for the fun of it but out of concern, that you could be chilling or doing anything else but you're here hoping you can get through to them, etc etc. But even then, at any moment they can just have a small 'frustration aneurysm' and leave the path of logic behind... In the end, we can't 'force' people to believe in what we believe in, regardless of how much sense it makes and/or how useful it would be for them; either we're open and clear minded enough to be reasonable or we're not. 🤷

Most people get defensive when you go after their beliefs, but try going after their reasons for why they believe something, people won't be as defensive. Some good examples of how to do this are on YouTube, look for street epistemology. I follow someone named Anthony Magnabosco most of his videos center around religious beliefs but you can apply this to just about any belief. It's not 100% fool proof but it's helped me tremendously when talking to people with wild beliefs.

These two books have helped me enormously in having transformative conversations:

• Never Split the Difference
• Crucial Conversations

And you can understand their way of thinking and how to communicate better ideas with

• Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff

Get to the emotional reasons why they hold one or more of the dissonant beliefs, then try to both make them feel heard and to plant a seed for addressing that emotion, while offering a non-dissonant alternative

I tend to just present information, but without trying to argue a point. Just a "here's the information" and see what they do with it. Then I go from there.

let them do what they want, if they ask your opinion be honest

Block them in phone, email, and any social media, stop talking to them, and do my goddamndest to stop thinking about them as well.