Tumblr feminism pioneered that particular obnoxious ad hominem approach that the woke use to shut down dissent and avoid having to defend their positions. Not very clever or coherent, but very impressed with itself. It was a jarring departure from liberal norms then. Now it is, sadly, the air we breathe.
Yep, before there was sealioning there was "Not All Men," deployed as an infallible, conversation-ending rebuke to any attempt to challenge or qualify or just disagree with some sweeping feminist criticism of men. So if someone in an article or comment section somewhere said something like "men will ALWAYS leave their wife of 20 years and mother of their children for a 22 year-old piece of ass," and someone responded by saying, well, sometimes maybe, but not all the time: BZZT. Nope! You just attempted the "not all men" gambit. Comment invalid; conversation rejected; here's that stupid Kool-Aid man graphic for you instead.
I think "I can't be racist, I have black friends" is the archetypical example of this rhetorical phenomenon. The initial concept that having a token "black friend" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for accusations of racism certainly makes sense, however, it's application has become overly broad and applied to situations where it doesn't make sense. For example, if someone claims that an individual doesn't associate with people of color (and by extension that this insularity makes them a likely racist), then the presence of black friends would indeed be pretty weighty evidence to the contrary.
I think there's a certain type of person who's decently intelligent, but not quite intelligent enough, who becomes overly enamored with these sorts of rhetorical clubs.
The black friends thing is historically interesting because the usual counter at the time was to point out that person meant their servants or their mammy, which isn’t always the same as friends. But that is rarely the context anymore, so the existence of actual black friends really does tend to be evidence against racism.
"I think there's a certain type of person who's decently intelligent, but not quite intelligent enough, who becomes overly enamored with these sorts of rhetorical clubs."
tumblr is a fascinating place. It has probably the largest radical feminist community on the Internet too. Statistically its users are 95% female, 85% millennial, and spend 3x as long online per day as users of other social media platforms. There are very passionate people of every unusual stripe, and I do mean every.
So I don't think it's really right to say that "Tumblr feminism" pioneered this behavior. I think it would be more accurate to say that because of its unusual userbase, tumblr reflected growing trends in academia & activism before other platforms, and before people were necessarily willing to espouse those opinions publicly.
I don't think that's exactly true. You can find plenty of material in essentially that style from certain circles of academia & activism dating quite far back. As an example, one incident resulting from this style was the expulsion of white students from the SNCC, which I believe happened in 1966. It's more that tumblr was the first social media platform to host a notable lay discourse in that style, largely by people roleplaying as the fiery activist-academics they read about in their textbooks, and possibly including a few modern activist-academic inheritors of that tradition as well. Saying that they invented the style is giving them a lot of undue credit.
The style that Jesse is talking about really pertains specifically to internet discourse. I don't think it really translates to print or in-person encounters.
I take it you haven't read any Frantz Fanon? The style is not new. It's been brought into internet discourse essentially whole-cloth from its viral reservoirs in fringe academia. Thinking of it as some new fad is a dangerous underestimation.
Personally...I can't help but feel that the dogmatic academics & activists who then & now have been this style's proponents, if born in an earlier age, would have been excellently productive theologians & lay preachers. I think what we have here is really another phenomenon resulting from the decline of religiosity.
Most people, it turns out, are not really capable of navigating the world without something to fill the place of an all-guiding religion. They have an irrepressible urge to declare some praxis, person, or notion all-important and not-to-be-questioned. This applies to the rich as well as the poor, and the educated as well as the un. See critical theory, transgenderism, psychology, scientology...
To rhetoricize - the educated masses have lost their opiate, and they're not having a fun withdrawal.
I really think that terms like this were invented by people who, on some level, are fully aware that they aren't able to justify their opinions in an adversarial debate. If you assert "I believe X", someone asks you to explain why you believe X, and you can't, it will be very embarrassing for you. To preempt this, you have to develop a norm that even asking people to justify their opinions somehow constitutes "harassment" or "bullying" or "gaslighting" etc. (but only if this request is being made of people who hold the "correct" opinions, of course).
This is the downside of ideologies which spread, not via reasoned argument, but via conformity and the implied threat of ostracisation. You end up with millions of people who know exactly what the opinions they're supposed to hold are, but who are powerless to actually defend those opinions in a debate.
And this is exactly why Mill argues for free speech! If you don't know the reasons for your own beliefs, even if those are correct, you are not justified in holding those beliefs. And, you need to know the reasons why one's opposition is wrong, not just THAT they are wrong.
I was an avid xkcd reader for a long time, until that First Amendment comic came about. I was first gobsmacked on just how awful it was, and xkcd fell out of my daily rotation for a while and just never came back, even when I saw many subsequent comics that were fantastic.
Seriously, the fact that people can't distinguish between what the FA legally protects and the much more expensive culture of free speech that society needs and is increasingly attacked by all sides is depressing.
Yeah it feels like a deliberate or willful misunderstanding at a certain point. When you have people seriously arguing "physically stopping someone from making a speech and trying to disrupt it by screaming or pulling fire alarms or calling in bomb threats has nothing at all to do with freedom of speech," you know you are talking to someone who is trying very hard to miss the point
The really annoying thing is that it’s not even some remote hypothetical. I’m a Xennial and I remember times when the shoe has been on the other foot and it was the right being censorious and the left arguing for a broader interpretation of free speech.
In his post, Jesse gave the hypothetical (which I've been offering for years) of social media platforms being controlled by anti-abortion companies, who ban pro-abortion takes on sight. Randall Munroe and co. would surely be up in arms about this, but what principle would they have to fall back on? "It's a private company, they can do what they want."
Fast forward however many years and Elon Musk buys Twitter and immediately starts twisting it to his own ideological ends. To all the woke people rending their hair about this now that the boot's on the other foot, all I can say is: we warned you, repeatedly, for years, that this would happen, and you ignored or dismissed these warnings. When you abandon a politically-neutral principle in favour of exercising raw power, don't be surprised when what goes around comes around.
I find that these woke, social-justice types don't have principles; they have sympathies. They like trans people, so whatever policy helps trans people is good even if they opposed that same policy twenty years previously because it helped rich people. They like when PayPayl cuts off Gays Against Groomers even if they'd hate the same thing happening to Mermaids. They know The True Way, and that frees from from any responsibility to be ideologically consistent or even ideologically coherent.
True, although I don't think this phenomenon is unique to woke people. Many right-wingers who were bleating about the importance of free speech for the last five years a) avidly supported censorship in the 90s-00s and/or b) are currently cheering on Elon Musk banning the X accounts of people he doesn't like.
People who sincerely stick to their principles even when it's inconvenient for them in the short-term are very rare.
As with many concepts, Sea-Lioning (and JAQing) both usefully identifies a set of behaviors and is also overused. There really are people who will abuse (more or less) liberal discursive norms
The real issue of course is that mass online discourse--especially Twitter centered--is just irredeemably broken. Bad faith begets bad faith, it's just shitposting all the way down.
It all comes down to "don't argue in bad faith." Of course, everyone assumes the people they agree with are acting in good faith while everyone they disagreeing with is arguing in bad faith.
To be honest, assuming bad faith is probably the right thing to do on an open platform like Twitter. It's unfortunate, but the density of shitposters and bad faith makes it a reasonable assumption.
Of course if you *are* just asking questions in good faith and I dismiss you as JAQing, that's now me behaving in bad faith. And so on it goes. As McLuhan said: the medium is the message, and the medium turns out to be shitposting.
Smaller communities with active moderation can get around this dynamic. I was a poster on a web forum that managed to keep things together for the better part of a decade, and likewise I'm in a few small Discord servers that are also able to maintain good faith discussion. But active moderation only scales so much; eventually you get big enough that it fails and the shitpost/bad faith dynamic asserts itself.
I disagree, or at least it depends on why you're arguing. I argue to work through my thinking on subjects. Assuming every rebuttle is in good faith and then steelmanning it is the best way to do that, though I'll ignore pointless or uninteresting rebuttals, regardless of if they are in good or bad faith.
If you are trying to convince people of things then ignoring bad faith arguments can save you time, as the person is unlikely to be convinced, though responding or at least identifying the argument as being in bad faith can be helpful in convincing other people in your audience. Of course it's easy to assume too much is in bad faith, and if you start claiming positions that your audience actually holds are made in bad faith, you are quickly going to lose your chance to convince those people.
I think this last thing is happening on a large scale as people on the left have taken to assuming every critique, particularly on social issues, is bad faith, when a lot of moderate, convincable people actually hold concerns that are at least similar to the concerns being raise on the right.
The problem I've always had with this mode of discourse is that Sea-Lioning and JAQing actually AREN'T concepts at all, let alone useful ones. They're labels. There doesn't seem to be any conceptual content that would allow a disinterested observer to tell when a question is a legitimate question, and when it's Sea-Lioning. It's just a label that gets used as shorthand for "I don't like this question" or "I don't like the person asking this question." It's 100% subjective and incapable of actually defining or describing any behavior, and usually seems to be used just to add an objective/in-group sheen to someone attempting to dodge a question.
To be clear: there's nothing wrong with refusing to answer a question online! But the discourse would be a little less psychotic if people just came out and said something like "I'm not getting into this with you. Have a good day," rather than attempting to label the question they're avoiding as harassment or a breach of etiquette, which is what applying labels like "Sea-Lioning" attempts to do.
Yep - not every behavior needs to be categorized as a Universal Thing. The labels serve no function beyond allowing one conversant to render the other illegitimate rather than having to defend or clarify a position.
The thing that's always made my head hurt about the sea lion comic is that the woman's first and only reaction to the sea lion, who has overheard her say something rude about sea lions, is to say "shut up and go away." Which makes her seem off-puttingly hostile, and kind of an asshole, even before the increasingly ridiculous harassment. Isn't she supposed to be the one who earns the reader's sympathy? And if the point was to criticize the sea lion for refusing to give up the argument, shouldn't her first response been some kind of attempt to explain or apologize or something like that?
The way it's drawn, it really seems like the argument being made by the strip is "it's fine to be an asshole online, but attempting to engage with an asshole constitutes harassment, of the asshole." Which maybe really WAS the message, given how the strip has been used, but not the one the artist intended?
The key is that I think it's just a really terrible comic strip. It's both not clear what the artist was trying to say, and very clear that the artist failed to convey that message, whatever the message was supposed to be
For an old person such as myself, reading about the behavior of the denizens of social media is like being introduced to the mores and folkways of some distant tribe. I cannot help but wonder where people find the time and energy to engage in this type of pointless conflict. Please take a moment if you can to elaborate on why people on social media enter into these bitter, pointless arguments with people they don't know. What is the payoff?
Thank you for being a guide in this bizarro world.
Thank you for saying what I was thinking. I had seen that comic a couple of times before and was mystified by it. Now that Jesse overexplained it, I finally get it. Useful to know, but like who cares?
I can't be the only one who read that "apology" from the original strip creator and found it to be a sniveling mess?
"The people in the strip have cars and a home" ??? This is the problem?
"Why did you focus on the genocide and not the annoying asking of questions?" Because one seems more relevant than the other, an odd element to include if it's not relevant.
I appreciate Jesse's use of the Hugbox here. The logical conclusion of a lot of these kinds of norms seem to be to completely avoid upset or insult, which of course can't be done in all disagreements, and only gets applied in a selective fashion. It's a road to absurdity.
"I could do without sea lions" does not imply the woman is calling for the genocide of sea lions. If someone said that to me, I would take it to mean she is interested in other animals and would prefer not to see sea lions at the zoo, when scuba diving, hanging out near a San Francisco pier, or other sea lion venues. "I could do without Paris" means I have no interest in visiting Paris, not that I think Paris should be bombed into oblivion.
I make that ridiculously banal point because I think it's important to understand the point being made by the term sea lioning (though I confess that this piece is the first time I have become aware of the term).
If someone is calling for genocide, aggressively following up with questions strikes me as appropriate, regardless of whether the other person wants to engage. On the other hand, if they're tossing off a random opinion about why they prefer one thing to other, pursuing them after they indicated they have no interest in engaging with you usually is problematic behavior.
It's fine for you to respond to someone who says they don't like sea lions or Paris with an explanation of why you do. But no one owes you an explanation for why they believe what they believe.
Except in the (limited) context of the strip, Sealions are part of the society in which the couple lives. They also talk! So it's less like saying "I could do without sealions [animals in zoo]" and more like saying "I could do without [ethnic group that I cross paths with in daily life]".
I agree that it's not *genocidal*, but definitely sounds a lot like "I would like to move to a racially exclusive neighborhood".
I don't think that's the right reading Katrina. I think the point of the sea lions was the absurdity, not that "sea lions" equals ethnicity. Malki makes that point directly in the quote from him Singal includes (emphasis mine):
"It is meant as a metaphorical stand-in for human beings that display certain BEHAVIORS. Since BEHAVIORS ARE THE RESULT OF A CHOICE, I would assert that the woman’s objection to sea lions — which, if the metaphor is understood, is read as actually an objection to human beings who exhibit certain behaviors — is NOT analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics."
Having said that, even were your reading right, and the woman was saying "I could do without the Jews", I'd still make the case that sealioning is the wrong approach for handling that situation. Asking a bunch of questions about why someone could do without the Jews is neither going to change the anti-semite's mind or enlighten anyone else. In this case, I'd advise the sea lion to share their own perspective and move on. You're dealing with a terrible person who it won't be productive to engage with.
But if you're dealing with the far more common world of disagreements among people of good faith, it's totally fine to ask good faith questions if you're genuinely trying to better understand someone's perspective. But if someone isn't responsive to those questions and you continue to ask them or you are asking loaded questions that are meant more to make your point rather than to gain understanding, I'd argue that is a bad approach to online dialog. Instead, I'd suggest making your point and inviting the other person to share what they disagree with. Think that is far more likely to a productive discussion.
>Asking a bunch of questions about why someone could do without the Jews is neither going to change the anti-semite's mind or enlighten anyone else.
It probably won't change the anti-Semite's mind, but if the anti-Semite's justification for his worldview is weak, it makes him look bad and makes his position seem untenable to onlookers, thereby making antisemitism less palatable. If anti-Semites can reasonably expect to be forced to justify and defend their opinions every time they express them publicly, that imposes a social cost on people intending to do so, making such people less likely to express those opinions publicly and thereby denying them oxygen.
This strikes me as a much more effective strategy for dealing with the far-right than the woke left's preferred strategies of "censor them; if that fails, physically assault them", which only serves to give the far-right free publicity and makes them look like victims/martyrs.
FionM: I agree with your goal, but I think pursuing someone with questions isn't the right approach. It just makes the question asker look annoying. Hence the Sea Lion meme.
If you think someone is wrong, make the case for why they're wrong. If they don't engage with your arguments, that indeed will help make their position untenable to onlookers.
But I agree with Jesse that the sealion comes off way better than either of the two women in the comic. To me he comes off as a paragon of civility in the face of very obnoxious and unfair treatment, when he would in fact by well within his rights to respond to said treatment with more overt hostility.
I've never heard this term before now, but after pondering it and reading this article I am now sure of one thing: that comic strip is terrible. I have no idea what point the artist wanted to make but whatever it was they really failed
This is an interesting case of a creator writing something other than he intended.
Even if you replace the sea lion with a specific group of people it’s still wrong. In fact, way way worse. Like you said, you have to change the nature of the complaint from something genocidal to banal.
Also I tried to write eliminationist above and my iPhone tried to correct it to “Eliminate Israel” so that was some shit.
I've definitely heard "I could do without" used in a fairly broad set of ways. If one interprets it as "I do not, personally, desire to interact with them", as I think the author intended, the sea lion is rather more obnoxious than if one interprets it as Jesse does.
...which does not change the fact that "sealioning" is a classic version of the "oh no my menchies" shit that makes Twitter an abominable thing that the entire human race, by any definition, could do quite well without.
To extend Jesse's example: "I do not, personally, desire to interact with Jews" would be reasonably construed by just about anyone as an antisemitic (if not genocidal) statement, and I think a Jew who overheard someone say that would be well within their rights to take offense.
There has always been a way of dealing with aggressive, bad-faith questioning, which is to ignore it.
But ignoring it (by design) doesn’t call attention to itself and is therefore unacceptable in the internet economy, where only things with attention have value.
I think the comic underlines an inconsistency in how many users of social media would like speech norms to work. In the "sea lion" comic, the Victorian folks would prefer social comments to be treated like small talk in a public place. Yes, someone can say something upsetting in public, it's fine to challenge that, but don't follow someone home and continue to pester them about it (presumably, the equivalent in social media would be to continue to comment about it long after the initial poster has made it clear that they don't want to engage). I think that's a fine norm in and of itself.
However, it can't be the case that we need to treat social media like small talk in public while simultaneously treating speech on social media like sincerely held beliefs recorded in letters that we can mine for offense when we're upset with someone. It can't be the case that it's incredibly rude to call someone out on their Final Sea Lion Solution in the moment, but it's fine to use said comment as the basis for a HuffPo call-out article 10 years later (presumably, because Victorian Lady was publicly seen reading Harry Potter and The Two Sexes). Yes, I know that such articles will only get written about Bad People, but it's a schizophrenic way of handling speech.
I was aware of the comic long before I ever heard the expression “sealioning.” I have to say I always found the comic pretty funny, but to me the key to its humor was that I could understand where each character was coming from. Everyone was being an equal mix of reasonable and unreasonable. Sorta disappointed to learn that the author preferred a more one-dimensional interpretation.
There’s a public figure who likes to call effective altruists genocidal eugenicists and then accuses them of sealioning when they reply to that ludicrous accusation on social media.
I'm going to defend the use of sealioning as a slur, on the grounds that it is stupid to engage with idiotic statements in the first place. Secondly, it always invites the respondent into an old old debate. Thirdly, people should have better things to do than 'debate' online. Down with sealioning.
Tumblr feminism pioneered that particular obnoxious ad hominem approach that the woke use to shut down dissent and avoid having to defend their positions. Not very clever or coherent, but very impressed with itself. It was a jarring departure from liberal norms then. Now it is, sadly, the air we breathe.
Yep, before there was sealioning there was "Not All Men," deployed as an infallible, conversation-ending rebuke to any attempt to challenge or qualify or just disagree with some sweeping feminist criticism of men. So if someone in an article or comment section somewhere said something like "men will ALWAYS leave their wife of 20 years and mother of their children for a 22 year-old piece of ass," and someone responded by saying, well, sometimes maybe, but not all the time: BZZT. Nope! You just attempted the "not all men" gambit. Comment invalid; conversation rejected; here's that stupid Kool-Aid man graphic for you instead.
I think "I can't be racist, I have black friends" is the archetypical example of this rhetorical phenomenon. The initial concept that having a token "black friend" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for accusations of racism certainly makes sense, however, it's application has become overly broad and applied to situations where it doesn't make sense. For example, if someone claims that an individual doesn't associate with people of color (and by extension that this insularity makes them a likely racist), then the presence of black friends would indeed be pretty weighty evidence to the contrary.
I think there's a certain type of person who's decently intelligent, but not quite intelligent enough, who becomes overly enamored with these sorts of rhetorical clubs.
The black friends thing is historically interesting because the usual counter at the time was to point out that person meant their servants or their mammy, which isn’t always the same as friends. But that is rarely the context anymore, so the existence of actual black friends really does tend to be evidence against racism.
"I think there's a certain type of person who's decently intelligent, but not quite intelligent enough, who becomes overly enamored with these sorts of rhetorical clubs."
The term you're looking for is 'midwit'
That's the term I was going to use, but decided to be nice about :)
tumblr is a fascinating place. It has probably the largest radical feminist community on the Internet too. Statistically its users are 95% female, 85% millennial, and spend 3x as long online per day as users of other social media platforms. There are very passionate people of every unusual stripe, and I do mean every.
So I don't think it's really right to say that "Tumblr feminism" pioneered this behavior. I think it would be more accurate to say that because of its unusual userbase, tumblr reflected growing trends in academia & activism before other platforms, and before people were necessarily willing to espouse those opinions publicly.
Certainly the ideas of wokery percolated for a long time in academia, but the online rhetorical style dates to the Tumbr era.
I don't think that's exactly true. You can find plenty of material in essentially that style from certain circles of academia & activism dating quite far back. As an example, one incident resulting from this style was the expulsion of white students from the SNCC, which I believe happened in 1966. It's more that tumblr was the first social media platform to host a notable lay discourse in that style, largely by people roleplaying as the fiery activist-academics they read about in their textbooks, and possibly including a few modern activist-academic inheritors of that tradition as well. Saying that they invented the style is giving them a lot of undue credit.
The style that Jesse is talking about really pertains specifically to internet discourse. I don't think it really translates to print or in-person encounters.
I take it you haven't read any Frantz Fanon? The style is not new. It's been brought into internet discourse essentially whole-cloth from its viral reservoirs in fringe academia. Thinking of it as some new fad is a dangerous underestimation.
Personally...I can't help but feel that the dogmatic academics & activists who then & now have been this style's proponents, if born in an earlier age, would have been excellently productive theologians & lay preachers. I think what we have here is really another phenomenon resulting from the decline of religiosity.
Most people, it turns out, are not really capable of navigating the world without something to fill the place of an all-guiding religion. They have an irrepressible urge to declare some praxis, person, or notion all-important and not-to-be-questioned. This applies to the rich as well as the poor, and the educated as well as the un. See critical theory, transgenderism, psychology, scientology...
To rhetoricize - the educated masses have lost their opiate, and they're not having a fun withdrawal.
I really think that terms like this were invented by people who, on some level, are fully aware that they aren't able to justify their opinions in an adversarial debate. If you assert "I believe X", someone asks you to explain why you believe X, and you can't, it will be very embarrassing for you. To preempt this, you have to develop a norm that even asking people to justify their opinions somehow constitutes "harassment" or "bullying" or "gaslighting" etc. (but only if this request is being made of people who hold the "correct" opinions, of course).
This is the downside of ideologies which spread, not via reasoned argument, but via conformity and the implied threat of ostracisation. You end up with millions of people who know exactly what the opinions they're supposed to hold are, but who are powerless to actually defend those opinions in a debate.
And this is exactly why Mill argues for free speech! If you don't know the reasons for your own beliefs, even if those are correct, you are not justified in holding those beliefs. And, you need to know the reasons why one's opposition is wrong, not just THAT they are wrong.
And no "you're wrong because you're racist/sexist/transphobic" is not a meaningful rebuttal.
I was an avid xkcd reader for a long time, until that First Amendment comic came about. I was first gobsmacked on just how awful it was, and xkcd fell out of my daily rotation for a while and just never came back, even when I saw many subsequent comics that were fantastic.
Seriously, the fact that people can't distinguish between what the FA legally protects and the much more expensive culture of free speech that society needs and is increasingly attacked by all sides is depressing.
Yeah it feels like a deliberate or willful misunderstanding at a certain point. When you have people seriously arguing "physically stopping someone from making a speech and trying to disrupt it by screaming or pulling fire alarms or calling in bomb threats has nothing at all to do with freedom of speech," you know you are talking to someone who is trying very hard to miss the point
The really annoying thing is that it’s not even some remote hypothetical. I’m a Xennial and I remember times when the shoe has been on the other foot and it was the right being censorious and the left arguing for a broader interpretation of free speech.
In his post, Jesse gave the hypothetical (which I've been offering for years) of social media platforms being controlled by anti-abortion companies, who ban pro-abortion takes on sight. Randall Munroe and co. would surely be up in arms about this, but what principle would they have to fall back on? "It's a private company, they can do what they want."
Fast forward however many years and Elon Musk buys Twitter and immediately starts twisting it to his own ideological ends. To all the woke people rending their hair about this now that the boot's on the other foot, all I can say is: we warned you, repeatedly, for years, that this would happen, and you ignored or dismissed these warnings. When you abandon a politically-neutral principle in favour of exercising raw power, don't be surprised when what goes around comes around.
I find that these woke, social-justice types don't have principles; they have sympathies. They like trans people, so whatever policy helps trans people is good even if they opposed that same policy twenty years previously because it helped rich people. They like when PayPayl cuts off Gays Against Groomers even if they'd hate the same thing happening to Mermaids. They know The True Way, and that frees from from any responsibility to be ideologically consistent or even ideologically coherent.
True, although I don't think this phenomenon is unique to woke people. Many right-wingers who were bleating about the importance of free speech for the last five years a) avidly supported censorship in the 90s-00s and/or b) are currently cheering on Elon Musk banning the X accounts of people he doesn't like.
People who sincerely stick to their principles even when it's inconvenient for them in the short-term are very rare.
As with many concepts, Sea-Lioning (and JAQing) both usefully identifies a set of behaviors and is also overused. There really are people who will abuse (more or less) liberal discursive norms
The real issue of course is that mass online discourse--especially Twitter centered--is just irredeemably broken. Bad faith begets bad faith, it's just shitposting all the way down.
It all comes down to "don't argue in bad faith." Of course, everyone assumes the people they agree with are acting in good faith while everyone they disagreeing with is arguing in bad faith.
To be honest, assuming bad faith is probably the right thing to do on an open platform like Twitter. It's unfortunate, but the density of shitposters and bad faith makes it a reasonable assumption.
Of course if you *are* just asking questions in good faith and I dismiss you as JAQing, that's now me behaving in bad faith. And so on it goes. As McLuhan said: the medium is the message, and the medium turns out to be shitposting.
Smaller communities with active moderation can get around this dynamic. I was a poster on a web forum that managed to keep things together for the better part of a decade, and likewise I'm in a few small Discord servers that are also able to maintain good faith discussion. But active moderation only scales so much; eventually you get big enough that it fails and the shitpost/bad faith dynamic asserts itself.
I disagree, or at least it depends on why you're arguing. I argue to work through my thinking on subjects. Assuming every rebuttle is in good faith and then steelmanning it is the best way to do that, though I'll ignore pointless or uninteresting rebuttals, regardless of if they are in good or bad faith.
If you are trying to convince people of things then ignoring bad faith arguments can save you time, as the person is unlikely to be convinced, though responding or at least identifying the argument as being in bad faith can be helpful in convincing other people in your audience. Of course it's easy to assume too much is in bad faith, and if you start claiming positions that your audience actually holds are made in bad faith, you are quickly going to lose your chance to convince those people.
I think this last thing is happening on a large scale as people on the left have taken to assuming every critique, particularly on social issues, is bad faith, when a lot of moderate, convincable people actually hold concerns that are at least similar to the concerns being raise on the right.
I love this! I will remind myself that my involvement in discussions/arguments is primarily to help *me* challenge and refine my own thinking.
The problem I've always had with this mode of discourse is that Sea-Lioning and JAQing actually AREN'T concepts at all, let alone useful ones. They're labels. There doesn't seem to be any conceptual content that would allow a disinterested observer to tell when a question is a legitimate question, and when it's Sea-Lioning. It's just a label that gets used as shorthand for "I don't like this question" or "I don't like the person asking this question." It's 100% subjective and incapable of actually defining or describing any behavior, and usually seems to be used just to add an objective/in-group sheen to someone attempting to dodge a question.
To be clear: there's nothing wrong with refusing to answer a question online! But the discourse would be a little less psychotic if people just came out and said something like "I'm not getting into this with you. Have a good day," rather than attempting to label the question they're avoiding as harassment or a breach of etiquette, which is what applying labels like "Sea-Lioning" attempts to do.
Yep - not every behavior needs to be categorized as a Universal Thing. The labels serve no function beyond allowing one conversant to render the other illegitimate rather than having to defend or clarify a position.
The thing that's always made my head hurt about the sea lion comic is that the woman's first and only reaction to the sea lion, who has overheard her say something rude about sea lions, is to say "shut up and go away." Which makes her seem off-puttingly hostile, and kind of an asshole, even before the increasingly ridiculous harassment. Isn't she supposed to be the one who earns the reader's sympathy? And if the point was to criticize the sea lion for refusing to give up the argument, shouldn't her first response been some kind of attempt to explain or apologize or something like that?
The way it's drawn, it really seems like the argument being made by the strip is "it's fine to be an asshole online, but attempting to engage with an asshole constitutes harassment, of the asshole." Which maybe really WAS the message, given how the strip has been used, but not the one the artist intended?
The key is that I think it's just a really terrible comic strip. It's both not clear what the artist was trying to say, and very clear that the artist failed to convey that message, whatever the message was supposed to be
For an old person such as myself, reading about the behavior of the denizens of social media is like being introduced to the mores and folkways of some distant tribe. I cannot help but wonder where people find the time and energy to engage in this type of pointless conflict. Please take a moment if you can to elaborate on why people on social media enter into these bitter, pointless arguments with people they don't know. What is the payoff?
Thank you for being a guide in this bizarro world.
Thank you for saying what I was thinking. I had seen that comic a couple of times before and was mystified by it. Now that Jesse overexplained it, I finally get it. Useful to know, but like who cares?
I can't be the only one who read that "apology" from the original strip creator and found it to be a sniveling mess?
"The people in the strip have cars and a home" ??? This is the problem?
"Why did you focus on the genocide and not the annoying asking of questions?" Because one seems more relevant than the other, an odd element to include if it's not relevant.
I appreciate Jesse's use of the Hugbox here. The logical conclusion of a lot of these kinds of norms seem to be to completely avoid upset or insult, which of course can't be done in all disagreements, and only gets applied in a selective fashion. It's a road to absurdity.
"I could do without sea lions" does not imply the woman is calling for the genocide of sea lions. If someone said that to me, I would take it to mean she is interested in other animals and would prefer not to see sea lions at the zoo, when scuba diving, hanging out near a San Francisco pier, or other sea lion venues. "I could do without Paris" means I have no interest in visiting Paris, not that I think Paris should be bombed into oblivion.
I make that ridiculously banal point because I think it's important to understand the point being made by the term sea lioning (though I confess that this piece is the first time I have become aware of the term).
If someone is calling for genocide, aggressively following up with questions strikes me as appropriate, regardless of whether the other person wants to engage. On the other hand, if they're tossing off a random opinion about why they prefer one thing to other, pursuing them after they indicated they have no interest in engaging with you usually is problematic behavior.
It's fine for you to respond to someone who says they don't like sea lions or Paris with an explanation of why you do. But no one owes you an explanation for why they believe what they believe.
Except in the (limited) context of the strip, Sealions are part of the society in which the couple lives. They also talk! So it's less like saying "I could do without sealions [animals in zoo]" and more like saying "I could do without [ethnic group that I cross paths with in daily life]".
I agree that it's not *genocidal*, but definitely sounds a lot like "I would like to move to a racially exclusive neighborhood".
I don't think that's the right reading Katrina. I think the point of the sea lions was the absurdity, not that "sea lions" equals ethnicity. Malki makes that point directly in the quote from him Singal includes (emphasis mine):
"It is meant as a metaphorical stand-in for human beings that display certain BEHAVIORS. Since BEHAVIORS ARE THE RESULT OF A CHOICE, I would assert that the woman’s objection to sea lions — which, if the metaphor is understood, is read as actually an objection to human beings who exhibit certain behaviors — is NOT analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics."
Having said that, even were your reading right, and the woman was saying "I could do without the Jews", I'd still make the case that sealioning is the wrong approach for handling that situation. Asking a bunch of questions about why someone could do without the Jews is neither going to change the anti-semite's mind or enlighten anyone else. In this case, I'd advise the sea lion to share their own perspective and move on. You're dealing with a terrible person who it won't be productive to engage with.
But if you're dealing with the far more common world of disagreements among people of good faith, it's totally fine to ask good faith questions if you're genuinely trying to better understand someone's perspective. But if someone isn't responsive to those questions and you continue to ask them or you are asking loaded questions that are meant more to make your point rather than to gain understanding, I'd argue that is a bad approach to online dialog. Instead, I'd suggest making your point and inviting the other person to share what they disagree with. Think that is far more likely to a productive discussion.
If a comic strip needs a 5 paragraph explainer it's not doing its job.
>Asking a bunch of questions about why someone could do without the Jews is neither going to change the anti-semite's mind or enlighten anyone else.
It probably won't change the anti-Semite's mind, but if the anti-Semite's justification for his worldview is weak, it makes him look bad and makes his position seem untenable to onlookers, thereby making antisemitism less palatable. If anti-Semites can reasonably expect to be forced to justify and defend their opinions every time they express them publicly, that imposes a social cost on people intending to do so, making such people less likely to express those opinions publicly and thereby denying them oxygen.
This strikes me as a much more effective strategy for dealing with the far-right than the woke left's preferred strategies of "censor them; if that fails, physically assault them", which only serves to give the far-right free publicity and makes them look like victims/martyrs.
FionM: I agree with your goal, but I think pursuing someone with questions isn't the right approach. It just makes the question asker look annoying. Hence the Sea Lion meme.
If you think someone is wrong, make the case for why they're wrong. If they don't engage with your arguments, that indeed will help make their position untenable to onlookers.
But I agree with Jesse that the sealion comes off way better than either of the two women in the comic. To me he comes off as a paragon of civility in the face of very obnoxious and unfair treatment, when he would in fact by well within his rights to respond to said treatment with more overt hostility.
I've never heard this term before now, but after pondering it and reading this article I am now sure of one thing: that comic strip is terrible. I have no idea what point the artist wanted to make but whatever it was they really failed
Yeah it's insane
This is an interesting case of a creator writing something other than he intended.
Even if you replace the sea lion with a specific group of people it’s still wrong. In fact, way way worse. Like you said, you have to change the nature of the complaint from something genocidal to banal.
Also I tried to write eliminationist above and my iPhone tried to correct it to “Eliminate Israel” so that was some shit.
I've definitely heard "I could do without" used in a fairly broad set of ways. If one interprets it as "I do not, personally, desire to interact with them", as I think the author intended, the sea lion is rather more obnoxious than if one interprets it as Jesse does.
...which does not change the fact that "sealioning" is a classic version of the "oh no my menchies" shit that makes Twitter an abominable thing that the entire human race, by any definition, could do quite well without.
To extend Jesse's example: "I do not, personally, desire to interact with Jews" would be reasonably construed by just about anyone as an antisemitic (if not genocidal) statement, and I think a Jew who overheard someone say that would be well within their rights to take offense.
There has always been a way of dealing with aggressive, bad-faith questioning, which is to ignore it.
But ignoring it (by design) doesn’t call attention to itself and is therefore unacceptable in the internet economy, where only things with attention have value.
I think the comic underlines an inconsistency in how many users of social media would like speech norms to work. In the "sea lion" comic, the Victorian folks would prefer social comments to be treated like small talk in a public place. Yes, someone can say something upsetting in public, it's fine to challenge that, but don't follow someone home and continue to pester them about it (presumably, the equivalent in social media would be to continue to comment about it long after the initial poster has made it clear that they don't want to engage). I think that's a fine norm in and of itself.
However, it can't be the case that we need to treat social media like small talk in public while simultaneously treating speech on social media like sincerely held beliefs recorded in letters that we can mine for offense when we're upset with someone. It can't be the case that it's incredibly rude to call someone out on their Final Sea Lion Solution in the moment, but it's fine to use said comment as the basis for a HuffPo call-out article 10 years later (presumably, because Victorian Lady was publicly seen reading Harry Potter and The Two Sexes). Yes, I know that such articles will only get written about Bad People, but it's a schizophrenic way of handling speech.
I was aware of the comic long before I ever heard the expression “sealioning.” I have to say I always found the comic pretty funny, but to me the key to its humor was that I could understand where each character was coming from. Everyone was being an equal mix of reasonable and unreasonable. Sorta disappointed to learn that the author preferred a more one-dimensional interpretation.
Yet more evidence that whatever connection the artist has to his art is irrelevant. Art stands on its own.
There’s a public figure who likes to call effective altruists genocidal eugenicists and then accuses them of sealioning when they reply to that ludicrous accusation on social media.
I'm going to defend the use of sealioning as a slur, on the grounds that it is stupid to engage with idiotic statements in the first place. Secondly, it always invites the respondent into an old old debate. Thirdly, people should have better things to do than 'debate' online. Down with sealioning.
>it is stupid to engage with idiotic statements in the first place
Why?
Seeing what you did, there
It's a sincere question.
I will be locking my doors tonight