What to Do When Someone Disagrees with You – A Guest Post By Frank Fleming

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

We live in a very contentious world with constant, angry arguments online and it feels like people don’t even know how to deal with disagreement in a healthy way anymore. Disagreement is a part of life, though, and we have to know how to navigate that. You could just ignore the disagreement, but that seems wrong when you have a strong belief. Instead, you need to learn how to correctly engage with someone who thinks differently than you.

What to Do When Someone Disagrees with You

Get to know the person. When dealing with disagreement, what you need to do is understand the other person’s perspective. So, find out all you can about this person. Check all his social media. Look at his old tweets. Whatever you can find.

Understand his interests. A big part of what makes up the perspective of each person is his hobbies and his job. Find what clubs and organizations he’s a member of. Especially find out who employs him. Then call them up to find out more, saying things like, “I want to tell you what this person you employ believes and see how that fits with this company. Is this something that makes you happy about his employment or makes you rethink it?” You’ll learn a lot this way about whether these organizations could be a source of the thinking that led to this disagreement or whether they might view things differently.

Appeal to those he respects. Another big thing that influences someone’s beliefs and may be a source of disagreement is who he confides in. This could be his friends and family. Seek them out and find out what they think. “Did you know your friend has this belief?” you can ask them. “Do you really want to be associated with that?” Again, you’ll find out a lot about who you have a disagreement with by who sticks by him and who becomes more wary.

Try your argument out on others. Maybe, the problem with the disagreement is your argument. You should test it by trying it on others. A good way to try it on a lot of people is social media. That way you can tell thousands at once what this other guy said and see if they agree it was a terrible thing and you are right. If you have the better argument, you should be able to get a lot of people to back you up — a whole mob maybe — who will help you in tackling the disagreement.

Meet the person face to face. To make your argument sincere, it’s best to make sure you’re delivering it face-to-face. Perhaps, though, the person lives far away. For that situation, you can post the person’s home address to the mob you found of like-minded people. Maybe they can visit this person with the bad opinions and confront him face-to-face with better arguments and or fire.

Agree to disagree. Now, if you’ve followed all these steps, the person who disagreed with you should be fired from his job, isolated from his friends and family, and is now being confronted by a mob while his house burns. But perhaps he still looks at you defiantly and says, “I disagree!” Sometimes, despite trying your best, disagreements persist. There’s nothing now to do but to agree to disagree. So what if he wants to continue to mistakenly believe that Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie? I guess as long as no one employs him or talks to him and he lives in a box, that’s fine.

FROM FRANK J. FLEMING: Hellbender 2: Double Hockey Sticks.

#COMMISSIONEARNED

This is the sequel to the novel Hellbender.

I’m not sure what to do here. If you read and enjoyed the first one, I don’t feel like I need to sell you very hard on this one. The characters you love from Hellbender — Doug, Bryce, Lulu, and Charlene — get into further misadventures, while I also expand on the lore from the first one. Are the people in charge really demons? What happened in the Last War? Well, there are more answers and more questions in the sequel — you know how it works.

If you haven’t read the first one, it seems like I should just point you to the blurb for that novel. I mean, I made my best attempt at explaining the story in that one. It’s a post-apocalyptic comedy. There’s a mercenary gang of loveable losers (called Hellbender) in constant conflict with more powerful forces out to destroy or oppress them. And Satan — or a guy who says he is Satan — is involved. It’s intriguing, and it’s funny.In this one, Hellbender faces an indescribable horror, a terrorist group that just enjoys terror and makes no demands, and a bunch of nuclear weapons. The gang is in way over its head again, and it’s going to be fun. I am excited for you. You know what? If you haven’t read the first one, just go ahead and jump into this one and read the first one later — consider it a prequel. You can call this book Hellbender and the previous one Hellbender: Origins.

53 thoughts on “What to Do When Someone Disagrees with You – A Guest Post By Frank Fleming”

  1. And remember, him disagreeing with you is not a valid reason to eat him. Besides, he may be poisonous. [Very Big Crazy Dragon Grin]

  3. At first, with that super-serious opening, I was afraid Frank had been corrupted by the forces of ‘can’t we all just get along’. Luckily, it’s a fine example of Frank J’s sardonic commentary.

  4. I don’t know why people I disagree with should be allowed to have boxes to live in.

    That seems unreasonably generous.

    FrankJ is getting soft in his old age.

      1. Hey, Mars is a serious threat. If it wasn’t for Bugs Bunny, Mars already would have obliterated the Earth 🙂

  5. The sad thing is that I had to read it twice to realize the actual nature of this post, despite the big hint of the source. This postmortem, er, postmodern age…

    1. I “got it”, but only after a few paragraphs; until then my main thought was “Who has enough time to do all that?!?”.

      A masterful post! 🙂

      1. When stamping out every trace of nonconformity is important enough to you, you make the time. 😮
        ———————————
        There are no FBI ‘special assets’ hiding under your bed.

    2. Same here. It wasn’t until the paragraph mentioning the “whole mob” that I got it. If you don’t mind an attempt at a foreign language: Moo.

    3. Today started early, and the fun and games in town were tiresome. (The gun counter at $FAVORITE_WMD_SUPPLY was busy enough to need a number system–thanks and matched middle fingers to Oregon’s Progtards. OTOH, there’s nothing I want/need badly enough to deal with this crap right now.) On the gripping hand, a fair amount of people have cash/credit/EBT cards, so the grocery stores were busy. Really busy. And Sumdude who thought his newish, low end Subaru needed two parking spots near the stores. Arggh.

      I looked at the bold lead lines, thought “Frank’s being unreasonably reasonable today. Eh?” Then I saw the comments and started to read the rest of the paragraphs.

      Queue Beatles: “I’m so tired…”

      VBEG, /snerk

      1. Regarding the stores … You’d think there were holidays coming up, starting with Thanksgiving on this Thursday. I mean, really!

        Full disclosure. What I call parking stalking has been in full swing both at Costco and the closest Fred Meyers (Krogers). Freds was so bad Monday that when I came out of the store the circling cars were stalled, no where to go.

        Regarding the WMD stores … the Oregon background check system has crashed.

        1. “crashed”. They’re disguising malice with incompetence again.

          And I make it a policy not to go anywhere related to shopping Thanksgiving weekend.

      2. And Sumdude who thought his newish, low end Subaru needed two parking spots near the stores.

        And that’s when you park next to him, as it right next to him. Make door handles kiss, on both sides.

        1. At $FormerWorkplace one feller liked to park at the end of the row, partly to mostly on the “don’t park here” striping so nobody would be next to him. I had a beat-to-crap old car (the one before I had the Corolla…) and it would fit just fine into the empty space he didn’t fully use, so I’d make a point of parking ‘just so’ when I could. What could he do? Complain about someone parking correctly when he didn’t?

        2. Hubby liked doing that when we still were driving the Blue Whale (’58 Plymouth Power Wagon …. made most of today’s pickups look small) … This was late ’70s till ’80.

  6. This is going to come in handy. Definitely using it. I’ve never had a mob on my side before…looking forward to finding out what it’s like.

  7. & I, for one, of course agree that if you disagree with me it may be going a bit too far, to string you up upon a tree for all the world to see, but none the less, discarding the rest, coldcocking seems a viable option to me.

  9. I’m not the audience you are looking for Frank. I will however mention it to others, since some of them are. I mean nothing other than this, so just take this as written, and nothing else. q

  12. In a serious disagreement, one can keep axing the same thing, over and over.

    Oh, hello, Mrs Hoyt!

    (Grin)

    1. The same thing? I thought they were orthogonal things: The X-axing, the Y-axing, and the Z-axing.

        1. Jerry Pournelle used to bring a double bladed axe to tech conventions as his “double sided double density hackers tool.”

    1. Too close to others truth. Happens too often. While I used the 🙂 x3, it really should have been ” 🙂 Ouch 🙂 Cringe 🙂 Ouch Cringe …” Then that is the point of sarcasm comedy, pointing out the truth.

  15. I’ll confess, he had me going for the first few paragraphs. I had to reread the “call his employer” bit multiple times – internal monologue saying “wait a minute… What?” – before I picked up what he was laying down.

    Well done sir!

  16. @ Frank — I’ve gotten used to hearing people say the Democrats are using “1984” as an instruction manual — but you’ve managed to top Orwell.
    Brilliant.

    1. This is the true answer to Mr. Flemming’s “Those who Disagree.” You stand up and scream “BRING IT!” in their shocked faces.

      Then you watch your audience engagement go up. JK is doing pretty good out of being labeled a TERF these days.

      1. But JK sent some “mean tweets”; The lesson here of course is that no matter how much people adhere to leftist ideology, ANY who deviate even slightly from orthodoxy will be targeted for destruction.

  18. When the only lampoon of the Wokeies still possible is a list of what they actually do. Anything else and they’d just one-up you.

    Still, given recent events at Farcebook(Meata), Twittler and Amazoon, namely 30,000++ layoffs between them, not to mention FTX, it does seem that having your pronouns on your resume (and your social media) may be a fad that has run its course. Like the hula-hoop.

    Mmmm. popcorn… ~:D

  19. I have to say you really had me there; I had nearly finished a reply when it sank in that this was satire. (Probably Juvenalian satire, if I understand the categories correctly.)

    A while back, I talked with some people I know about the Muslim rape gangs in the UK. And a little later, one of them got in touch with my wife, C (I think via FaceBook), and said to her that I shouldn’t get my news from the Daily Mail. Now, in the first place, that was a purely conjectural history that had no resemblance to the facts: I had read the story in the Guardian and followed up to read the actual government report it was based on, so this woman’s attempt to discredit my statements as coming from a conservative source was not merely fallacious, but based entirely on her own imagination. But beyond that, she was trying to do the maneuver of calling on a wife to change her husband’s behavior, and in doing so she was trying to drive a wedge between C and me, all of which is exactly like one of your suggestions above . . .

    It’s rather sad, because this is a woman I used to have some respect for, and now I haven’t. But I guess it’s better to know.

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