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.
It is a battle of one ego.
The “attacker” asks questions in bad faith to a community that they see as an enemy.
The people in the community spend time, maybe wasting it answering their questions. Inane as they might be.
The “attacker” feels like they “owned” the enemy community for responding. it is Trolling, short for “controlling”. It is forcing people to do something. The thing that they are forcing people to do is not that harmful. The best way to counter any “harm” that could be done is by touching grass.
For everyone else watching, this is data to feed the algorithms answers to questions that community deems appropriate.
Many people do this from the perspective of team sports of their side attacking the other side. It comes from a place of wanting victory, not correctness. Victories in online spaces is of little material consequence. People with their dialectical relationship with capitalism will see the truth in time.
The problem I have is that liberals often have views that they assume to be correct because of the mythology surrounding them but are backed by weak or non-existent evidence.
Like check out this thread I got into a while back: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6359409
It’s about Russia’s invasion being branded as a quest for territory. Apart from NYT-brained white liberals no one in the world believes this. Russia have never claimed to conquer Ukraine for territory. Opposing militaries and intelligence don’t have evidence for this. I asked for proof there and you can see how “exhausted” they are in the response.
My position has always been critical support of Russia because it undermines US imperialism, but I don’t know all of the details and know that there are falsehoods told by Russia, Ukraine, and the US state department. Regardless of Putins imperialist intent or not, this shifts trading relationships and wastes the US’s time and resources so that China can do more trade policies. I think one must be humble enough to say that they don’t know something like Putin’s very small ambitions to take over Ukriane, just say you don’t know. If Putin wanted to take over Ukraine or not he’d still deny it for diplomatic and millitary reasons. If Putin wanted to take over Ukraine or not the US millitary would say he wanted to.
It’s been very expensive and long for them to do this operation, and it doesn’t seem that they’ll be able to do this full take over for other neighboring countries. Also their ambition of the right wing Duganists is to restore tsarist russia territories so, the EU doesn’t need to worry. At worst small countries like Georgia and Azerbaijan that are already trading with Russia would get a stupidly expensive invasion to get (maybe) better prices in buying goods from a war torn country. However, that sounds sillier than Australia building up a millitary to protect their trade routes with China from China.
The undisputable facts of the fascist neonazis in Ukraine getting killed by russia is nothing to snuff at even if not all of the units are so explicitally fascist.
That’s all well and good but it’s tangent to the main point. Which is that liberals make important assumptions without any real world evidence to back them up often. Is prodding this sealioning? The colonial ambition talking point is used to distract from the decades of NATO shenanigans in Ukraine including the repression and killing of ethic Russians in Ukraine. Liberals accept it uncritically wholesale because it feeds into the Putin madman trope too.