The white male style of debate is to antagonize you until you snap. Then they win by default, because they make up their own rules in which being upset automatically invalidates your argument. The key is also to argue about things that they have no stake and experience in, so they dont snap first. Of course in the event that they do snap first, its of course passion, not anger…
White people are like little kids who make up new rules and obnoxious powers to keep themselves from losing….
At the end of it all, they are happy that you are so civil and can debate things rationally and clearly without getting upset. Everyone shakes hands and thanks everyone for being able to discuss “conflicting” viewpoints. Because after all everyone needs to hear the opposing side to truly be sophisticated. Even if you’ve heard that side all your life and it completely devalues you as a human being.
What i hear is that the mark of civilization to white people is being dehumanized and taking it like a champ.
They also have little to no concept of power dynamics in these ‘sophisticated” discussions.
Why I stopped indulging people who followed this argumentative “format”
This is so real and applicable to every dinner party I’ve ever been to
This is a particularly aggressive form of Sealioning.
Sealioning
is the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive and willfully intentional cluelessness,
that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand.A
Sealion is someone who, when confronted with a fact that they don’t care to
acknowledge, say, the persistence of systemic racism in America, will ask
endlessly for “proof” and insist that it is the other person’s job to
stop everything they are doing and address the issue to their satisfaction.The
purpose of Sealioning is never to actually learn or become more informed. The
purpose is to interrogate. Much like actual interrogators, Sealions bombard their
target with question after question, digging and digging until the target
either says something stupid or is so pissed off that they react in the
extreme. The other major reason why people hate Sealioning is because
responding to it is a complete waste of time.It’s
an insidious trap. Responding to questions asked reasonably is, of course, a
natural thing for people to do. I like to do it myself; educating others is
generally pretty entertaining, especially if they are receptive to learning.
Dismissing those questions can appear condescending or rude, especially if you
actually are condescending or rude.Of
course, these questions are not asked because the person asking them genuinely
wants to know the answer. If they did, they would do their own digging based on
your statements, and only ask for obscure or difficult-to-discover information.
This is the “debate principle”. It is best explained thusly: When you
go to a debate, you educate yourself on the topics at hand, and only request
evidence when a claim is either quite outlandish or unflinchingly obscure.No,
these questions are asked to make a responder waste their time. It works, too;
I’ve responded to Sealions before, answering all their questions and claims for
evidence, only to be greeted by even more willful ignorance. It’s a way to
force people into responding to questions phrased neutrally but asked in bad
faith.The
name “Sealioning” comes from a most splendid webcomic, “Wondermark”,
by David Malki.It
can be found here: http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/873260-sea-lioningSealions are just “asking nicely” but
they are asking questions that have been asked and answered fully many times,
and are unwilling to so much as open a new tab to look up the answer, nor will they
recognize the validity of your sources, your experience or expertise no matter what you do. It is impossible to satisfy a Sealion.Make no mistake.
Sealioning
is a specific form of harassment. You may not explain their inquiry has already been address. You may not cite a source. You may not refer to a previous answer. You definitely may not ever point them to a
link. You must spend all your time and energy responding as much as you can to every little details of every innocent, polite little question they ask. Sealioning isn’t a sincere attempt
at anything. It’s a calculated technique to grind an opponent down.My family does this all the time. They talk constantly about logic in arguments but when I mention an argument is a fallacy their response is always “so what?” And to have me repeatedly explain in detail why such arguments aren’t valid.
Indeed so demanding sn opponent explain everything in absurd detail is illegal in regimented debate.
I used to do this. I’m so glad I had the right people around me in college to wake me up to how fucking shitty this is.
It’s also not productive. You don’t learn anything, you don’t expand your horizons this way. It’s a way of staying comfortably the same, insular from ideas, segregated from knowledge or experience, and making one’s self feel justified and righteous in one’s beliefs. I like debate, not for the active debating, but for the things that I learned and the way it forces me to explain my ideas to divergent groups of people. That in and of itself is tremendously informative and often results in an alteration of the original thought.
Very useful.
the modern American, in my experience, doesn’t want to debate. They want to win the conversation, and will use this tactic to achieve that feeling. It makes conversations very… contentious.
Let us say it properly. They don’t want to win. Winning requires actually showing the opposition to be inferior. They don’t and cannot truly do this with these tactics.
They want to remain comfortable and JUSTIFIED. They want to be unquestioned. They want to be safe.
Be wary of the intellectual who is unafraid. Those are people whose wisdom is come by naturally and purely
It makes me sad that this is my mom style of debate at the dinner table, and I would eat it up Hook Line & Sinker, not knowing what it was. Now I’m just too tired to keep it up so I don’t even let her start.
Mine too. I used to do it, until one day my then boyfriend said to me “Wow…you must be used to arguing with stupid people.”
And I was like…I cannot argue with that. And the more I thought about it, the more I was forced to think to myself, “Yes! They were stupid. I hated it then. I realized I was falling into that patten and that the pattern was weong. And I stopped doing that bullshit then and there.
The Brain Squirrel Monologues 