Have you come across the term “sealioning”? First time I saw it in the sidebar of a liberal lemmy instance and now I noticed it was mentioned off hand in a blog post I was reading where another blog post about it was casually linked: http://simplikation.com/why-sealioning-is-bad/
For the longest time I had never heard of this term. It seems to be related to someone persistently asking for evidence. Most of the discussion and truth seeking I have done online has been in Marxist circles and while it is not always high quality I have never once preceived someone or been perceived as a troll for asking for evidence which is why this whole thing is confusing to me.
There is some thing that I would like to acknowledge first. It is completely possible to use a Socratic line of questioning to argue in bad faith and waste someone’s time. If you dig deep enough into someone’s worldview it is likely you will hit a wall of presupposition or common sense for which the person does not have any supporting evidence at hand.
But I have never seen this tactic being deployed systematically. I have never been sealioned. Sometimes I have made claims which I haven’t been able to support with evidence but when that has been pointed out, it has been embarassing but I haven’t felt like some cheap tactic was used to discredit. And this has happened very rarely. If you read the linked comic strip in the linked blog post, it reads very weird. It feels like circular logic but I think its not quite that.
I’ve only seen this accusation used in the extremely liberal sections of Reddit or our friendly lib instances.
It doesn’t really feel like an efficient way to derail a conversation in text: you say something, the person responds asking for a source; either 1) you reply with the source or 2) you don’t and the conversation dies.
Compare that with “Just Asking Questions”, which can quickly frame complex issues in unstated but obvious ways that usually pander to preconceptions or even conspiracy theories. Those need to be directly confronted (or banned) every time and can easily pass as curious cluenessless.
But irl it can be very annoying. Imagine having a conversation where the person asks you to cite the source of every remark like you’re a walking academic article. Dealt with a Trotskyist fake leftist fucko who once even wanted me to cite the Kinsey-scale paper after I offhandedly mentioned it while talking about my bisexual living experiences.
Edit: but libs hate both this and JAQing because they have no actual sources and can’t properly answer those questions without sounding reactionary themselves.