Sealioning

Is there a difference between sealioning and just asking for verification of a bold claim? On a forum such as Lemmy, where people are encouraged to have unsolicited debate in the comments, are we by nature immune from the worst aspects of sealioning?

This strip has always rubbed me the wrong way. If you make a statement in a public forum, don't be surprised when the public responds. They are not entitled to your attention, but you're not entitled to their silence. I will not be providing any sources to back up my position, but I'm sure your requests for them will be very witty.

Other related argument techniques used on the internet (and elsewhere) often commingled with Sealioning:

Butwhataboutism is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense of the original accusation.

Also, ignoring the rebuttal and constantly shifting the attack to a tangentially related part of the discussion forcing the opponent to defend and rebut each new point, generally exhausting them and causing frustration and irritation.

JAQing off is a way of attempting to make wild accusations acceptable (and hopefully not legally actionable) by framing them as questions rather than statements.

Moving the Goalposts in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded. Closely related to butwhataboutism.

Appeal to Hypocrisy (tu quoque) basically tries to invalidate your opponent’s argument by using a “your side did it too, worse” and shift the argument to them defending themselves.

Did anyone else read the sea lion's voice in a British accent?

It's a clever method of trolling. But if you come prepared and/or are willing to put some effort in, you actually can wreck them with evidence and sound arguments that shuts them completely up.

This is very satisfying.

There's a joke that goes

I am Firm; You are Obstinate; He is a Pig-headed Fool.

By analogy,

I'm challenging offensive assumptions; you're asking stupid questions; he's sealioning.

You know I kind of find it funny that the internet has kind of, invented a million different technical debate sounding words for basically just "people that I don't like". It doesn't really matter whether or not the person is actually "sealioning" anymore, or whether or not the word ever had a definition in the first place, because it's just something that you're gonna get slapdash labeled with when someone doesn't like your line of argument, or the fact that you've disagreed with them, or whatever. Thought-terminating cliche, oh, there's another buzzword, and, oh, ironically, there's another one.

Oops, you're a troll, you're a bot, you're a sealion, you're strawmanning my position, you're arguing in bad faith. Signals get crossed over the written medium, anyone will inevitably think someone else is arguing in bad faith when they're not. There's better insurance, better strategies against that, then just kind of labeling it and then moving on.

I think the biggest problem is that labeling the behavior doesn't really tell you what your response should be. If someone is arguing against you in bad faith, you sort of have the options of, arguing back against them in equal measure, equally bad faith, which I would say is the trap most people fall into. You also have the option of arguing against them as though you don't recognize them as being in bad faith, while being as courteous and nice as possible, which can go some amount of the way to clarifying that you're not arguing in bad faith if you've been mistaken. Or you can just not respond, which is probably a good idea. Don't feed the troll, don't reward them with attention.

But also, to some degree, someone else arguing in bad faith shouldn't really matter. What should matter, I would think, is whether or not they're arguing correctly. If they're doing so incorrectly, then they're not going to be giving you anything interesting to work off of, and then you should probably just ignore them. That's my advice. It's like, they're just a more advanced form of spam, and the solution to spam is pretty simple. You block it, you ignore it.

"I think eggplant tastes horrible"

"Got a source to back that up?"

Yep, sounds about like some motherfuckers around here.

There’s two or three people I’ve interacted with here fairly regularly that perfectly fit this description.

I wonder if Malki finds the coining of this term to be his greatest accomplishment. I know I would.

Is is weird that when I see a comic, there's an inverse relationship between the depth and detail of the drawing and my likelihood of reading the strip?

Entirely irrational, I know.

A real life example of Sealioning

Does anyone else feel this (and, subsequently, the term itself) is mildly racist? Or at least defensive of racist/bigoted statements? Like, if someone said "I could do without [insert race here]," is it unreasonable to hold them accountable? I get this is intended to be about people not letting go of minor nitpicks, but the setup is pretty poor, imo.

Online Discussions be like:

I didn't know there was a name for that. Basically the obverse of a Gish Gallup.

Yeah, I can't help but feel that the message of this comic would be turned on it's head if you'd replace the sea lion with a Jew, black, Palestinian, gay, trans, etc....

Gosh don't you hate it when this happens?! The last Sea lion I encountered blocked the elevator at work for four consecutive workdays because he "politely" refused to accept that "lions" without kitty paws are an abomination and should either not exist or strive to get a new name. The audacity!

This comic sucks and openly defends racist rhetoric. Why is it so highly upvoted on Lemmy?