veloper said:
No really, the point of debate is to make your opponent look bad in front of an audience. This is what trolls do for laughs.
Unfortunately not just trolls - people who genuinely believe they're in the right will apply it as best they can. I was part of a British Politics group on Facebook till very recently, and I learned two very important lessons that caused me to leave.
First off, if you're going against a right-winger, anything you say is spoken from privilege and snobbery. If you say Polish immigrants aren't destroying the country, that's because you're upper middle-class and haven't lived
on the streets. Neither have they, mind, they live in a house, but there are Polish people outside and that's scary. Then they'll take a different track and bring up either your employment or your education, or bizarrely, both.
"I bet working at Argos taught you all about our history."
"No, my university course in history did that."
"Books don't teach you everything, you know."
Sample dialogue. The kind of argument that makes you lose your original thread and wind up defending doing minimum-wage work
and working on a degree as though either of them are flaws. And it will take all your willpower not to ask how many GCSEs they needed from the 'School of Hard Knocks' to get into the 'University of Life,' as they proudly display on their 'About' tab.
Bizarrely, the same people calling for the en-masse 'repatriation' of migrants and descendants of migrants get really upset if you say 'fuck' near them. I mean, the debate grinds to a halt and they demand an apology. One example was when I got outnumbered by Scottish Nationalists (not SNP supporters but Anglophobes) and one of them called me a retard. I replied, "There's no fuckin' need for insults now is there?" and the Scot rather angrily insisted, "How am I being insulting when you're swearing?"
Doesn't even make any sense, man.
But that doesn't compare to the left-wing. They're not nearly so obvious with the 'trolling,' and this is because I actually think they believe it. You might have noticed the Malaysian government arrested a bunch of tourists for posing naked on a sacred mountain - now my opinion on this is that it's a law based around religion or superstition, and is therefore a bad law. You might disagree, but we're not arguing that here because it's largely irrelevant.
One person defended it as "their country their laws," but I disagreed on the basis that we should all be held to the same standard. Malaysia shouldn't be encouraged to punish people based on blasphemy laws if we'd consider that barbaric elsewhere, because that's the same as saying "Well they're not a civilised race like us so you have to expect that kind of behaviour. Malays will be Malays."
To me, that's fairly simple logic.
Three separate people:
"Oh look, the Little Englanders strike again."
"Typical imperialism."
"Nice to see colonialism is still around."
I will admit, that riled me. Smug bloody left-wingers tutting and throwing out words they barely understand rather than addressing the argument placed. I said as much, and got an admin warning for 'personal attacks,' but the only personal attack (I didn't call them smug or imply they were stupid) I found was that I called someone a fascist for believing in 'arbitrary borders and the absolute authority of government.' They didn't deny believing as such, but they took offence to the term 'fascist.'
So...yeah, a bit long-winded, but my point is that it's not just trolls that believe in embarrassing an 'opponent.' People genuinely think that if you swear, you've lost the argument. If you have to use 'labels,' you've lost the argument. If enough people tut derisively, you've lost the argument.
Or if someone calls you a misogynist, you've lost the argument. However that works.
