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 put it in the same category as concern trolling, tone policing, etc. All ways of using legitimate issues (interrogating the validity of a position, discussing how words or actions are perceived) as derailment tactics. This can be used by anyone, too – I’ve seen these labels dropped into conversations to avoid answering tough, seemingly good-faith questions.
Overall, these strike me as another version of debatelords dropping the names of logical fallacies as some kind of own: they rarely do much besides derail the conversation into meta shit about what the terms mean. Effectively responding if you think someone is doing this requires more than just calling it out.