Ayden
Veteran
1. Make them feel important by feigning interest and pretending to listen to them.
Anyone who waxes on and on about Baudrillard and the Simulacra on a forum full of WoW players is looking for people to listen to them. If you give them even a slight reason to believe that you’ll listen to the verbal vomit that comes out of their mouth, you’ll have them clicking accept on your party invitation immediately. You should know, this may involve large conjectures and poorly linked references to current political situations that you may not understand.
IMPORTANT: This will take practice and will inevitably require resolve. By tempering your questioning in favor of blind agreement with whatever position you THINK they’re taking, you too will also create well crafted responses like this one.
2. Ask simple and sarcastic questions so they can answer them in their own way.
Unlike the average human, XPOff ethicists won’t see simple and coherent questions as anything other than an excuse for them to fire back a question to you that you may not be prepared for. XPOff ethicists love this because it allows them to show how deep and intimate they can be with you with little to no warning.
3. Reference Philosophy books you have read only by name and NEVER ask questions about the books they reference.
This tip may seem unintuitive. You may tell yourself, “This seems silly. I’d love to discuss my interpretation of Derrida’s work Dissemination and how language regularly becomes dispersed and loses meaning when poorly utilized on internet forums WITH my XPOff ethicist.” While you may enjoy this idea, substantive discussions with your XPOff ethicist will never be fruitful if you actually know what is in the text. I cannot stress this enough, it is best to say you have read the book but really ‘didn’t get it.’ That way they can make up some bullshit about the author and their text's importance.
Further on this point, make sure that when they reference authors and books back to you in a trade of blows, you DO NOT ask questions about them. Name dropping books and authors is the social currency of any good XPOff ethicist and if you ever name more they may have to make up weird sentences in a discussion to contribute additional names, which is generally awkward for all parties involved. These instances will be abundantly obvious when you hear someone’s name or text with no reason as to why they were added to your conversation.
TIP: Remembering to avoid questions is especially important when their understanding of a writer and their works is built upon three second movie clips that show the spine of the book they’re referencing to you.
4. Appreciating the Nuance of their arguments
Most people already know this but our community seems to be lacking in this department. Nuance is a key phrase that intellectuals will use in an attempt to force the further contemplation of an overbearingly long text that they wrote. If you hear this phrase you may want to stop and check your social standing in the conversation and reevaluate whether or not you’re going to require them to explain something completely unrelated in an attempt for them to retain their status of being correct in the overarching conversation.
TIP: Remember any conversation you engage in with an XPOff ethicist is not about WoW, it is about being right and unless you’re an XPOff ethicist yourself, it isn’t part of your role to be right.
If you ever get this deep into a conversation with an XPOff ethicist, reasserting your role in the conversation is likely to be the only way you can save it.
This example isn’t exactly ideal. While it does show that you, (the XPOff community member) understand the power dynamic in a potential Battlegrounds party, it doesn’t allow them to feel as though they are intellectually overpowering someone of value or worth. This will actively push your XPOff ethicist out of your social circles because they will spend their time seeking new intellectual hills to climb that give them more satisfaction.
Easily remembered by the acronym M.A.R.A, (short for Maraudon or Maraki) Pyramid readers should be able to lure XPOff ethicists into their groups with ease.
