Don’t respond.

Have you ever been in a situation (or how often have you been in a situation) where a person starts a conversation with you with a blatant and obnoxious mischaracterization of you or your values? Say, you wear a peace symbol on your T-shirt, and a person comes up to you and starts arguing that you anarchists are all pieces of shit. Sometimes, these arguments are more subtle, but still obviously wrong; more subtle in the sense that you wonder if you formed your sentences unclearly so that your words (or symbols) were misunderstood, and you try to regain that person’s respect by explaining yourself.

If messages like these are private, like online IM’s, just ignore them. The game here is that this person is trying to catch your attention by provoking you, sometimes acting superior to you when, CLEARLY, you are the superior. Say, you’re hailed the best-damned guitar player in the world, and there’s this guy from Asswipe, Oklahoma, claiming they’re a far better guitarist than you are and that you’re a freaking amateur in comparison. You want to be a nice guy and say “Oh well, I never said I was the best, obviously, there are other great players out there, many of whom I’ve never heard play…”

Just ignore them. The idea here is to provoke you to take a defensive position to defend your nice person image and pay attention to them. The idea is to start with a high-emotion argument and then gradually submit to you and force you to give them free life lessons as proof that all is good between you two and there are no hard feelings. Another attempt is to provoke you into giving them free link juice, screen time, Instagram shout-out… Or start an attention-driving online feud between a more popular online character than oneself. A lot of free link juice flowed to anyone daring to call Johnny Depp a wife-beater in front of Deppheads, and boy, did the mainstream media take full advantage of it, risking hefty lawsuits, the price of which was probably amply covered by the traffic created by the anger shot toward them.

It’s far more difficult to ignore people who are spreading deliberate misinformation about you or a topic you’re passionate about in public; just remember, people who believe absolute crap are not looking for the truth anyway, nor do they deserve it to be spoon-fed to them, either, but you might need to address some of them whether you like it or not.

Another good reaction is to simply take whatever people say as if they, and you, were a stand-up comedian. The key to understanding a good stand-up comedy is to TRUST that the comedian is actually smart, in truth, they admire you (if they addressed you directly), and that their intentions are benevolent; they mean no harm. Now, if you listen to everybody believing they are not stupid, they like you, and want to amuse you, you will start laughing at their stupid comments as if they were the funniest joke you’ve ever heard. Take it all as a potential parody and react accordingly… If they were serious, the lesson will sink in a lot faster when people laugh at them rather than try to use logic with a person who clearly understands none.

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