tl; dr Posters on this board will argue disingenuously, and it actually works on people who should know better. Even if you point it out. This is infuriating.
Even worse, they will often deliberately antagonize you when they know you are upset, trying to make you slip up.
This has frustrated and even angered me for a long time. It’s bad enough in regular life, but even more annoying on this board. It goes like this:
Person A posts an argument, with premises, claims, reasoning, examples, so on. It may be passionate or use rhetorical questions or even snark, but it’s an argument.
A reply to it is completely disingenuous. It will just be snark or mockery. It will take something they said out of context. It will quote one part and interpret it in a way that directly contradicts other parts of the post.
And yet, they act like they’ve refuted the argument. Worse, they get agreement. People fall for it.
But what infuriates me here is that even pointing this out does nothing! They double down. And people still continue to agree. On a board about fighting ignorance, the disingenuous tactics so often work, and thus encourage more!
I get the fact that people often are reluctant to admit they don’t have a counter argument. I get that, if you are passionate about something, you might not notice that someone did that. But WHY THE FUCK does pointing it out only seem to make things worse?
When it happens to me, I’ll even say “Feel free to show me where I’m wrong.” It doesn’t happen. But people still act like it has. In the Pit, they will often resort to mockery and thus trying to piss me off even more.
I know that fucking tactic. You piss off someone even more because angrier people are more likely to make mistakes. And, no, you can’t say that they are also just angry, because they snark and mock and are generally calm.
It’s bad enough that I have to point this out to MAGA and conspiracy theorists, when I deal with them spreading misinformation. (You know, fighting ignorance.) But this board should not be a hotspot for these ignorance-based, disingenuous tactics.
We really should know better.