It's astonishing to me that people don't give up the whole sovcit thing once

It is genuinely astonishing. I've tried with these people and seem how far they take it. Literally no limit to the willful ignorance. Even when they have to stand in the pouring rain claiming they're completely dry and the sun is shining.

"The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”

https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/