A year ago the cartoonist David Malki penned this rather amusing comic strip entitled The Terrible Sea Lion.
It was met with approval at Boing Boing and eventually became a meme referring to, “Intrusive attempts at engaging an unwilling debate opponent by feigning civility and incessantly requesting evidence to back up their claims.” This was tied up with Gamergate. AFAIK, the term didn’t have legs though, as urban dictionary provides only one unflattering definition.
As I see it the controversy boils down to one of diplomacy, etiquette and citizenship. Everyone certainly has a right to their opinion. They have a right to believe things crazy and sane, well grounded and dubious, open minded and bigoted, respectful of observation and tautological. They even have the right to ignore calmly presented evidence or tell people to buzz off under certain circumstances - that may even be appropriate! And good sea lions shouldn’t follow people to their homes or even from one forum to another.
But I say that if you make a claim in the public square, it’s reasonable to ask for evidence - in the public square. It is reasonable to ask for accountability. And that furthermore justifying a belief by simply saying that it is your opinion is a sign of a weak intellect - which is ok! Not everyone is cut out to be a pundit and not everyone pretends to be one. At the end of the day though -and bearing in mind that I assume the discussion is taking place in the public square- “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Ref: Internet rant.
To be fair, most of us spend most of our time outside of the public square. Which is healthy.
At best, defending an idea purely by stating that it is your opinion is unphilosophical. There are worse sins. But those aiming to fight ignorance should avoid such arguments.
It’s one of those annoying things that everyone notices their opponents doing, but fails to notice themselves doing.
Internet discussions are ripe for this sort of problem, because it’s not clear to what extent one really is in the public square. If five people are having a discussion in a thread, and fifty lurkers are reading it, are the lurkers part of the discussion? If not, why are they permitted to read it? If one of them chooses to enter the discussion just to challenge a statement that has been made, is he barging into someone else’s house, or is it his house too?
“I would prefer not to discuss this with you, sir. My beliefs are my own, and, while I may have made a statement in public, I am not going to follow up on it by a public debate. Let us agree to disagree, and change the subject. How about them Yankees?”
If they come back with, “So you refuse to back up your statement with facts?” you can answer, “That is correct, sir: I refuse to back up my statement with facts. Now may we allow the discussion to be dropped?”
One of the stupidest tropes, and we see it a lot here, is “You didn’t answer my question. Answer my question from post #73. Until you answer my question…” etc, ad nauseam.
It’s all about attempts to orchestrate both sides of a debate. “I say X. Now, you have to say Y. Oh, look, you said Y. How foolish…” It often comes in the form, “Now, my opponents are going to say Y…” or “Those nay-saying Y believers will never admit…” etc.
All straw-man variants, attempting to put words in someone else’s mouth.
Back up my argument with facts? Yes, I have facts, but from previous experiences I can expect you to sneer at my facts and deny that they are real facts, claiming that they are rumors, internet drivel and outdated semi-scientific assumptions. So why should I waste my time when I really don’t care if you believe me or not?
I guess I don’t understand the context. Yeah, if you were to throw a line about how you don’t like The Wizard of Oz in a post and I started badgering you about it, that would be poor of me. Likewise, following you into thread about car repair and badgering you about your Wizard of Oz stance would be extremely lame.
But if there’s a thread with an actual discussion about a topic and I ask you about that topic, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to continue to discuss the topic. The comic is amusing but doesn’t really seem to correlate to the meme – asking you to defend a stance in the “Kittens are the most terrible animal ever” thread and keeping my request in that thread isn’t the same as riding in your car, standing next to your bed or hovering over your breakfast.
I’m not really sure what we’re defining as the public square here. If I see someone post something dumb on Facebook, I’ll usually call them out. Most of the people I know who post that sort of thing neither examine their views nor want them examined, and will say “I don’t want to debate about this.” I’m fine with that; my post will still be there and any other onlooker who might have been inclined to agree with the original post without thinking too much about it may reconsider.
Hmmm, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison, but it is what came to my mind…
The whole thing sounds suspiciously like the “nice guy” trap. He is unfailingly polite and generous to the object of his affection, but she is having none of it. He feels “entitled” to a relationship because he has invested his energies and hasn’t been a “bad guy”. Sound familiar?
Because that, to me, appears to be a model of what you are describing (and defending?). Even though someone may have made a statement (in public, whatever that means) and even though they may have engaged in debate initially, they still have every right to call stop. (No means No, yah?) After that, no matter how politely, or effective you are being using debate tactics, it’s just badgering.
As I understand it, the term originally comes from the gamergate thing a year or so ago (it might be older than that, but that seems to be the event that popularized it) and deals with the distinction between:
Asking for evidence, which is a totally reasonable thing to do
Harassment and chasing people into unrelated conversations/places online and off under the guise of asking for evidence, which is an unreasonable thing to do
So if I made some unsupported comment in this thread, saying “Hobbes wasn’t actually a tiger, he was a vulture whose wings had been cut off” and someone asks for me to back up my statement, that’s not sea lioning.
If they then follow me onto facebook, where I haven’t mentioned Hobbes at all, and ask me to back up my statement, or find me in a coffee shop in real life, and ask me to back up my statement, then it’s not really about my lack of evidence - it’s about the questioner wanting to harass me - that’s sea lioning.
I might be misusing the term, or some people might be abusing it, but that’s how I understand it, and I think it meshes well with your comment, Jophiel.
In a message board format, this makes sense much of the time; participants in a conversation can ask each other to back up assertions on a somewhat equal basis, especially when debating some fact or policy. We can ask each other for convincing citations regarding economic policy and argue about the strength and applicability of the evidence. It breaks down when the “sides” of a conversation are asymmetric.
In a blog post or lopsided message board argument, there are several people asking questions for one person to answer. There are a few problems with this- one person will not be able to answer the questions of 20 people without an unreasonable time commitment, and no sort of developing conversation can take place, especially without threaded replies.
Just Asking Questions is a low-commitment activity, but answering those questions is more time-consuming. If the asker isn’t presenting an evidence-based counter-narrative, they are likely a) looking for flaws in a position rather than trying to understand it, and b) not likely to be convinced by even a well-supported answer. If the author spends the time to respond to their question and support their assertion, odds are high that the asker will either question a part of the reply, ask for support for a different part of the original statement, or disappear. Multiplied by several askers, this makes responding a low-value proposition.
When the subject is personal experience, these problems are magnified, with the addition of making everything exhaustingly personal. Unless the author already knows that the asker is actually participating in good faith, questions (especially hostile-sounding ones) are likely to be written off. It’s OK for the asker to remain unconvinced! If, when their questions are ignored, someone keeps asking them as if owed an answer, they may be sealioning.
I’ll admit that I do most of my internettin’ on message boards so I’m used to the concept of set threads, usually in sub-boards devoted to particular topics. I guess that, in a social media sense, you might see more of someone starting a thing on Facebook, then taking it to Twitter or whatever which would be more akin to someone popping out of the bushes to say “But what about this?!”
I agree with this. In the original comic, the woman is just saying her opinion about sea lions, that she could do without them. It’s an opinion, and one she’s allowed to have and not have to justify to any random sea lion that comes along.
An equivalent to Gamergate would be a woman saying online that she feels uncomfortable playing online games because she’s been harassed, and a Gamergate Sea Lion coming along and asking for evidence that she’s been harassed, and then if she provides it picking apart every story she has, and saying why it’s not valid and why her opinion is wrong.
The point of sea lioning is that no one *owes *you a debate.
If someone makes a public statement you disagree with, you’re free to make a counter argument. If you do, maybe they’ll engage with you and maybe they won’t. But, if they do refuse to engage with you, their refusal to debate is neither an attack on you or an admission of defeat. Pestering them to try to force them to respond to you is a form of harassment.
I think that’s dependent upon context. In a debate forum, it’s incredibly lame to make a factual claim backed up by “It’s my opinion.” But yes, most of the world isn’t a debate forum.
I agree with posters above that following someone from Facebook to Twitter to address claims in Facebook would be a (mild) form of harassment. I do think it’s acceptable to go a couple of polite rounds if the original claim was egregious and lacking in evidence. So I disagree with you somewhat: I say making a claim in a public forum does entail certain responsibilities. Claiming, “Pigs fly” and getting irritated when asked for evidence reveals a dim wit. But then again, I have to concede that after a certain point pestering reveals a lack of social graces.
So it boils down to calibration and context. Which admittedly is too general to be especially helpful.
All that said, Gamergate was pretty appalling, as I recall.
What about blogs? I find it difficult to imagine an overly polite request for evidence in a blog comment as inappropriate, provided you are commenting on the post in question of course.
What about RL conversations? Um, yeah I can imagine sea lioning being a thing.
Found via google: an alleged act of Sea Lioning in the wild. Chuck Wendig writes (lame IMHO) post in blog about Romance Writers. He is not a romance writer. He and his post is discussed on Twitter… but without being referred to with an @ symbol.
Blog:
[INDENT]“And, sure enough, despite a complete lack of @ reply, we have our sea lion.”[/INDENT]
Me: Holey moley. I say if you mention somebody in a public venue (i.e. on a public Twitter account) then the target has a right to reply. Admittedly, I have but the vaguest notion of the controversy that they are discussing. One tweeter appears to think that Chuck’s blog has somehow displaced other voices and that Chuck needs to listen. I had never heard of Chuck.
This puts the cartoon in a different perspective. Mr Sea Lion should not follow his attacker around. But I think he does have a right to show up if somebody is speaking publicly about him without notification and therefore behind his back. Twitter can be set up to be private. But it wasn’t in this case.
Zero results for Aug 2015 and after. Maybe this thread will help. And the peak was basically zero compared with, say, “Sea lion”. As a meme, this is a nothingburger.
That’s true to some extent. Something I have seen happen, though, and which can be irritating, is when someone makes an off-hand mention of something as part of blog post which is really about something else. And commenters will start focusing on and nit-picking the off-hand mention, while ignoring what was really intended as the subject of the blog.
For example, if someone is writing a post that’s about, say, Gamergate and how awful it was and how harrassment of women is far too common, and so forth. And, as part of a humorous introduction, they happen to mention that they don’t care for Doctor Who all that much. And the next thing you know, all of the comments are about how Doctor Who is a terrific show, and how could you not like it, and maybe if you watched it with this in mind, you would appreciate it more.
Those kind of responses may technically be about something in the blog post, but they still serve to deflect attention from what the blogger really wanted to talk about. I think in those cases, the blogger would be well within his/her rights to say, “Look, that’s just not what this discussion is about, so drop it.”
