chapotraphouse

Hi, I saw you in another thread and you seem cool and here in good faith, so I'm sorry that you're getting dunked on. We're a little high-strung and defensive right now because we're getting used to federation, so there's a bit of friendly fire. However, there is a reason that we're like this.

Here's a quote from Jean-Paul Satre about far-right debate tactics:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

If you are too attached to using a logical approach and giving the other side the benefit of the doubt, if you engage on their terms and let them define terms however they want, you've alreadly lost. No matter how many of their concerns you address, they will always come up with another. You'll just end up looking like a nerd or a crank, while at the same time lending credibility to them by engaging with them. But if you don't engage, you leave them unchallenged and it makes it look like you're afraid or have no answer.

The solution to this dilemma is Pig Poop Balls. PPB, along with dunking and rudeness, is a our way of keeping people on the straight and narrow. In theory, it's not supposed to be a first approach unless the person is obviously trolling. Ideally, we make our case with logic and evidence, but then when someone deviates from that and starts trying to redefine to terms of the debate, that's when we start bullying. We want two things to happen: first, we want to make our case effectively enough that people can't just write us off, and second, we want people to feel like they're not entitled to just say whatever nonsense they feel like and have it be respected and taken seriously. After all, an informed, well reasoned, and evidenced based position occupies the same amount of space as random nonsense. If random nonsense is tolerated, then it will dominate, because it's much easier to produce. So the proper role of PPB and bullying is to weed out the nonsense in order to have higher level discussions.

It's also, like, human beings did not evolve to be rational. A lot of the time, getting in someone's face and screaming at them is just more effective than trying to debate them. It's unfortunate and unpleasant but it does work. Generally though it's most effective when you have a reasonable, theoretical side to back it up, so that it's harder for people to write you off.

But yeah that culture developed when we were on Reddit and had lots of people wandering in and just reciting some baby-brained right wing cliche to try to own us, expecting us to clutch pearls or engage on their terms, and they generally had no idea how to react when we took them off-script. Then we were an obscure, isolated niche for three years, with only the ocassional troll wandering in, and so people got used to a higher level of ideological purity - we also had lots of disagreement and interesting discussions, but we mostly agreed on some basic ideas (which is kind of necessary to have higher level discussions). So now we're kind of... adjusting to the new situation, where a lot of people disagree with our positions on a fundamental level. I think (hope) it'll calm down (to a degree) in a week or so.