How to Deal with Opinionated People

People have all kinds of aggressive, often ignorant opinions. About everything! To deal with this without losing your head, you must first put things into perspective.

Decidedly on the rise is the profusion of aggressively opinionated people.

You know, those people who will get in your face, flaunt their opinions at you and, with little manners or decorum, do their very best to bait you into either agreeing with them or outing yourself as one of 'the bad ones' who believes not as they do.

Regardless of your set of beliefs (on any of a range of items), you can probably agree that there are many of both the people who agree for the most part with you and those who really don't agree with you who hold rigid, inflexible opinions about a great many things.

If you're a critical thinker, you can probably also admit that most people -- even most of those who agree with you -- hold only shallow understandings of the positions they purport to hold, and are far more emotionally attached to their positions than they are logically secure in them.

This is a human tendency, to form emotional attachments to views, often with only a superficial eye cast toward any kind of objective underpinning of said views. Opinionated, impassioned, yet superficial arguments are annoying to everyone, but they're especially annoying if you're a critical thinker.

There's little worse for critical thinkers than to find oneself in a debate with someone demanding he unquestioningly accept the veracity of a flimsily-supported position or else be forever damned as evil incarnate (or perhaps just stupid, brainwashed, or uninformed).

This article won't be about any particular current events or hot button issues, and if you comment I'd urge you to keep to the spirit of that here too.

Instead, its focus is on dealing with opinionated people: both avoiding pointless entanglements with them as well as preserving your own sanity despite maddening insistence you agree to the unreasonable or be damned.