it’s when you’re discussing how much you hate all members of group A and a person from group A is like “hold up, what?”

Okay, I laughed at that one.

To answer OP, the term is one of those SJ terms that is so easily prone to abuse that it’s poor epistemic or political hygeine or something to use it, because it can basically be used to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

its explicit purpose is to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

The source is, in fact, a comic in which someone is talking, in public, about how awful sealions are, and a sealion demands that they justify that assertion, and refuses to go away until they do. Which is, you know, entirely fucking reasonable, but is implicitly depicted as itself justification for the original assertion.

Nah, persistently pestering someone because they said they don’t like you is behaviour I expect well adjusted people to grow out of before their first decade.

The issue is not not liking me, it’s insulting me inaccurately in public — i.e., *libeling* me, if done knowingly or with malicious indifference to the truth. And failure to respond to my pointing out inaccuracies (or requesting more detail if the accusation is imprecise as to the details of what I am being accused of), or to correct the false assertions, is strong evidence of malicious indifference.

it’s when you’re discussing how much you hate all members of group A and a person from group A is like “hold up, what?”

Okay, I laughed at that one.

To answer OP, the term is one of those SJ terms that is so easily prone to abuse that it’s poor epistemic or political hygeine or something to use it, because it can basically be used to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

its explicit purpose is to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

The source is, in fact, a comic in which someone is talking, in public, about how awful sealions are, and a sealion demands that they justify that assertion, and refuses to go away until they do. Which is, you know, entirely fucking reasonable, but is implicitly depicted as itself justification for the original assertion.

Apparently following someone back to their house and refusing to leave it because they said something insulting about a group you are a part of is “entirely fucking reasonable” 

As I noted in a subsequent reblog that included the actual comic, the literal behavior depicted is unreasonable, but *in practice*, “invading my home/space” is routinely deployed online by feminists and sjws as a defamatorily inaccurate characterization of persistently replying to insulting *public* posts on social media.

So yeah, the real-world behavior that the sea lions’s actions are serving as a metaphor for is, indeed, entirely fucking reasonable. And the fact that unreasonable behavior is being presented as a metaphor for it is itself libellous — not legally, it’s true, but morally.

Good advice if you choose to take it.

Alternative solution: Stand and fight.

You can use the little bubbles button if you enable the new lab Tumblr has. It shows you the reblogging tree of posts, you can get the big blogs that way.

Fighting tends not to work, usually just ignoring online BS works better. Trolls don’t fight in good faith, so no matter what you do they’ll keep at it. Talking to the reasonable people, sure, but if there’s any whiff of belittling or not even bothering to understand, to find out what’s going on, then no, don’t engage. 

I don’t necessarily mean arguing the point, although I think that’s actually still useful for convincing third parties, who are usually what’s most at stake in even good-faith arguments. I just mean … fight. Do the internet equivalent of telling any of the harassers who get in your face or your way to back the fuck off, and then slugging them if they don’t. (And if any of them take it into meatspace, do the thing itself.)

I get really little anon hate, compared to some people I know who are much less verbally aggressive and somewhat closer to the orthodoxy that people are attacking them for violating than I am. And I think it’s not despite that fact, but because of it: Assholes send “you’re a disgusting transphobic/homophobic/racist/misogynistic/[insert variety of “oppressive” of choice here] shitlord; kys” messages to people they expect to actually suffer emotionally as a result. If they know that you’re response is going to be “Coming from a worthless shitstain like you, I’ll consider that accusation a badge of honor. Shitlord power, now and forever!” they’re a lot less likely to pick you for a target.

I interact less with people who are targeted heavily by far rightists, but my impression is that a similar principle applies: If you respond to “[applicable slur]s like you should be lynched” with “Let’s see you try; I wanna test out some new hollowpoints, and ballistic gel is expensive,” you’re a lot less likely to be targeted again than if you express fear or self-doubt.

Ah okay. I always forget those are things you can do online, whereas in real space you’d get smashed for that and things would get worse. I wonder if there’s been any research on how small scale harassment works online as opposed to real space. 

I think that in real life, it depends heavily on who is doing the harassing, and also on their motivations. Probably my priors are heavily influenced by the fact that I’m large enough that, even though my muscle tone is crap and I would more likely than not lose a fight against the median adult male, (a) this is not necessarily obvious, and (b) I’m reasonably confident that I could do a demotivating amount of damage in the process. Add to that that the people most likely to be giving me shit at this point are generally not terribly impressive specimens themselves, and I think that the expected value of insulting someone who’s harassing me in real life and getting in a fistfight that I’m not legally to blame for is probably positive in the long run. Not that day, but in the end.

Because, and this is the other thing, having to do with the question of who’s doing the harassing, while some harassers are trying to maintain total dominance of a space for their in-group, and are close enough to total dominance for it to be worth it for them to expend a lot of time, effort, and risk going against those who fight back, most of them, at least in my observation, are looking for victims to bully for their own enjoyment. And the latter sort tend to avoid people who are likely to seriously injure them, even if they’re likely to get injured worse in the process.

(Plus, a non-trivial number of them want to avoid getting arrested for assault. Compare the number of people advocating antifa violence online to the number actually participating in it.)

it’s when you’re discussing how much you hate all members of group A and a person from group A is like “hold up, what?”

Okay, I laughed at that one.

To answer OP, the term is one of those SJ terms that is so easily prone to abuse that it’s poor epistemic or political hygeine or something to use it, because it can basically be used to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

its explicit purpose is to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

The source is, in fact, a comic in which someone is talking, in public, about how awful sealions are, and a sealion demands that they justify that assertion, and refuses to go away until they do. Which is, you know, entirely fucking reasonable, but is implicitly depicted as itself justification for the original assertion.

I thought it was the “just asking questions” in bad faith, interpreting things as badly as possible, where the point is to get the person they don’t like to give up and snap (although obviously any term can be twisted and used badly itself). Like how terfs tend to be about trans people, so they’d be the ones sealioning at the trans people. 

This is the original comic:

Note how it begins with the woman publicly insulting an entire group, and how the sea lion never gets a chance to interpret anything in the worst light, because she never actually answers the question, not even to say “I will not; I am indeed unwilling to provide a defense of my statement to you.” It is true that the animal is portrayed as invading her house. But in practice, that analogy is consistently used by people who accuse others of “sealioning” with respect to “sea lions” responding (insistently) to public posts on social media, which is not remotely the same thing. That detail is itself a libel.

And, indeed, the author publicly responded approvingly to feminist use of the term to describe “harassment” in the form of demanding, online, that people justify insulting things they have said about the individual making the demand, or groups that they belong to. He even made shirts to celebrate it.

If someone is arguing in bad faith, you can accuse them of arguing in bad faith, and give reasons why. The purpose of the term “sealioning” is to define people arguing certain positions (essentially, any sort of defense of (any) anti-feminists, anti-sj cursed soldiers, gamergaters, sad puppies, or anyone else the anti-social and unjust “social justice movement” has decided are the enemy) as arguing in bad faith by definition, so that their arguments can be dismissed out of hand, and the people making them comfortably labeled as evil bigots.

It’s a kafkatrap: Arguing innocence is taken to be proof of guilt.

Ohhh. I’ve seen a much longer version of the comic, never read the whole thing since it was always super tiny print. The captions were always “he is a troll”, basically. Apparently this is the whole original thing though. This is part of that “any defense of yourself is taken as proof you’re dangerous”, so it’s a catch-22. Say nothing, you’re in for it; defend, you’re proving it; they play on your desire to not be “sinning” and to appease their anger to get their way.

Tangential, but why is it called a kafkatrap? It sounds like an abuse tactic that I’ve never found a name for, where the person forces you into whatever they want with exactly this method. 

Nevermind I read the coining: “My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all. The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.” And the rest of it, I never noticed how close the “you’re guilty because you benefit, even though you didn’t deliberately do anything yourself, so therefore I demand you self-flagellate” (followed often by “x-guilt does nothing for the cause!!!”) is to the abuse tactic of “everything is your fault” (followed by “nothing you do to fix it is ever enough”). 

Ew.

However, “Thus kafkatrapping tends to work best on weak and emotionally vulnerable personalities, and poorly on personalities with a strong internalized ethos.” isn’t true. That totally depends on whether you can realize that this is what’s going on. It has nothing to do with moral fortitude. In fact, the stronger your internal commitment to being “a good person” or to “considering the evidence”, you may very well be more susceptible to this trap. That is exactly the type this tries to exploit–those who are very concerned with ethics and goodness. Guilt exploits that. A person who doesn’t consider anyone but themselves as an ethical authority, is selfish, wouldn’t fall victim to induced guilt. 

I think the point of the original was for venting things like “I could do without men/the straights/rich people/etc”, and how those groups hound any marginalized person who says things like that. This is a very poor way to go about saying “there are valid complaints about major groups, and people should be able to say that without being hounded”. This argument could actually be used to condemn anyone who’d defend black people against a racist, etc, which is hilarious since that’s the opposite intent of the original. When your basic argument could equally say the opposite, it is a bad argument.

A person who doesn’t consider anyone but themselves as an ethical authority, is selfish, wouldn’t fall victim to induced guilt. 

As written, this appears to be conflating two different things. Drop the “is selfish” part, though, and I think you’re saying basically the same thing he is, but apparently with a negative emotional valence: If my fundamental reference point for moral evaluations of my own behavior is internal, i.e., if my response to an accusation of wrongdoing is to take account of any factual information contained in the accusation, and then ask myself “Have I, in fact, behaved in a way that contradicts my understanding of morality,” then I will not fall prey to a kafkatrap. I’ll simply recognize that the accusation is not, in fact, supplying any new factual information, reaffirm that I right to defend myself against incorrect charges, and tell the kafkatrappers to go fuck themselves.

I think the point of the original was for venting things like “I could do without men/the straights/rich people/etc”, and how those groups hound any marginalized person who says things like that.

I do, in fact, believe that it is morally wrong — albeit a minor sin, when done in a moment of frustration or anger, and when corrected if criticized — to publicly make blanket statements like “men are terrible,” on account of some wrong that a miniscule fraction of the world’s men (or of whatever other group you are insulting) have done to you or someone else! It is a sort of a non-specific (and therefore not legally actionable) libel (or slander, if spoken), against every single man who is not terrible, and libel is wrong. It is entirely appropriate for someone you just libeled to step in and say “hey, what the fuck!?”

Now, if you say “I was upset and was venting, and used imprecise language as a result, my bad, I’m sorry” and they don’t accept that but continue to hassle you, that’s not okay. If you make claims that are limited to insulting those who actually deserve it, and they still object, likewise, But in most cases where “sealioning” is claimed, the accusations are sweeping, and demonstrably false, and no apology or even acknowledgement of error is made.

Essentially, my basic view is that most if not all “major groups,” viewed as entities that one reasonably can have complaints about, don’t actually exist. There is no agent “Men” who behaves well or poorly, nor “Women.” There are individuals, and their behaviors vary. It can be useful to note patterns, but it is both epistemologically and morally wrong to treat such patterns as universals.

Redneck Revolt is doing the work of reaching out to people who would normally be against us and pulling them into the movement. They should be thanked and celebrated.

Redneck Revolt is incredible and I hope they keep up the good work

like poor rural folks have a lot of the same wants and needs as us leftists but find urban elitism and theory heavy discussion isolating (and who can blame them tbh). Like, no one except literal neo-nazis/fascists are our enemies and a search for ideological purity hurts us all. People who aren’t leftists might not be simply because no one has talked to them about it. And honestly, the far-right is way better about spreading their ideology and indoctrinating new people than we are and that needs to change asap

I do not give a fuck who’s with me as long as there’s a lot of them. votes don’t count more if you can pass a purity test. we need numbers.

So much all of this. Obama was actually GOOD AT THIS and I WISH I WISH I WISH that people would learn from that.

I don’t see why there should be *any* problem with this? (I mean, it doesn’t surprise me that there is, but. I don’t see how anyone serious about reform and “social justice” in 2017 would be against engaging the rural working class.)

Bluntly: because you can’t work with them and engage with them while remaining Ideologically Pure in the way that that kind of person demands. 

You literally cannot have a conversation with the kind of “redneck” they’re talking about, you can’t talk them around and actually engage with them, while insisting that Every Single Slightly Inappropriate Thing Be Apologized For At Great Length. You cannot do this work without considering their feelings to be important, and thus actually paying attention to your language and not talking in a way that alienates them. 

Which is to say: you do actually have to stop, look at your words, and make sure you’re NOT actually implying “all men” (for example). That what the person is HEARING from you is not “you are automatically evil for being a man.” To do this work you cannot insist that they do that work themselves, that they a priori know that when you say “men are so SELFISH” you are not necessarily talking about them, personally, in specific. 

If you want to actually talk to people and get them out there and get them to do shit like vote for you when they’re starting out on the other side, in the opposition (almost always because they actually have never had the opportunity to learn otherwise, and sure haven’t been given that opportunity without it being wrapped in hostility and being thrown at their faces), you have to approach them where they live. 

And that means you cannot abide By The Rules of purity-culture activism, because if, when the guy you’re trying to coalition-build with (and who may in fact have just worked two jobs in spite of being sick so he can put a LITTLE bit into a savings account for his two daughters, and who went home and spent an hour reading them stories and listening to their days and helped with homework and then got six hours of sleep before getting up to do it all again), says “fuck you, I am not selfish”, you go “STOP MAKING A TONE ARGUMENT, DON’T YOU REALIZE HOW THIS WORKS, GOD, YOU ARE TOTALLY AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT’S WRONG WITH MEN” … 

 … they are going to say “fuck you and the horse you rode in on”, and your bridge is burnt. 

That means that people who are actually trying to do bridge-building that WORKS, bridge-building that gets these people to the polls to vote for someone OTHER than the Cheeto-garbage of the world (because the Cheeto-garbage are the only ones who validate them and say “it’s all someone else’s fault”)? Make compromises. 

The purity brigade hate that. Making ANY kind of compromise, making ANY approach to these people, means you are KOWTOWING TO THE NAZIS AND WILL GET EVERYONE KILLED AND GUESS WHAT YOU’RE A NAZI-ENABLER AND PROBABLY NOT EVEN ~*REALLY*~ A PROGRESSIVE, BECAUSE THEY HATE US AND DON’T EVEN THINK WE SHOULD EXIST HOW CAN YOU EVEN TALK TO THEM?

The fact that this looks exactly like what the likes of Breitbart readers flail hysterically at people about cross-religious/cultural bridge-building with Muslim nations? Is not a coincidence. At all. 

Yep. Additionally, you might have to compromise or even — *gasp* — give in on actual political issues, including ones that are culture-war red meat to a lot of people on the knee-jerk left.

Take guns, for an obvious example. One of my asshole gun-grabbing friends from high school was once insisting, again, that there is no legitimate reason whatsoever for civilians — a group which, as far as I can tell, does not for him include police, which is really weird given his doctrinaire BLM support, and kinda guts the Posse Commitatus Act of any positive value whatsoever, but whatever — to own guns. I pointed out several, including hunting, to which he replied — and I quote — “I *literally* do not care about hunting.”

Well, it’s sure nice that a five-dollar doe tag and a one dollar (or less) bullet or shotgun shell has never affected how much protein your family is going to get to eat this month. Mine neither.

The fact that you just insulted the hell out of everyone who has had that experience, and there’s no way in hell they’re going to listen to you or anyone you endorse or any issue whatsoever … that part’s. And that’s before we get into his propensity to do shit like share Facebook memes that suggest that “young men who buy guns” ought to have people scream in their face that they’re murderers and stick ultrasound probes up their asses “just for the hell of it,” because unlike “young women who get abortions,” they actually deserve it. That is well into “I’m going to vote for whatever candidate you hate most, even if I can’t stand him myself, just to spite you” territory.

This is more or less an irrelevant aside, but I’ve always found it bizarre that hunting in the US has basically the exact opposite class connotations to in the UK.

In the UK, hunting is the sort of thing the Queen’s family gets up to, and that’s the association - aristocratic recreation.

I would imagine that this is indirectly due to the size of the country and more directly due to how densely populated it is? This means that hunting for food is Not a Thing because there’s next to no vast tracts of land for huntable animals to live on, and where there are somebody owns that shit, so the term is not ‘hunting’ it’s ‘poaching’.

Large areas of undeveloped, wild-animal-filled land that are not nature reserves are then a conspicuous symbol of wealth (because there’s not much land to begin with so if you have any there’s strong economic pressure to use it for literally anything more lucrative), and hunting as a pasttime that requires that is strongly associated with the landed gentry.

(Stuff like hiking and camping and whatnot that is similarly outdoorsy doesn’t have the same connotations, I imagine chiefly because you can do those things in nature reserves/national parks and such, and because of Rambling Rights which are a fascinating thing I don’t have time to get into.)

EDIT: also there’s a history of royalty and gentry having exclusive rights to hunt in places, I think not just in places they specifically own. So that’s also got to be a factor.

Absolutely. Hunting for food has been something that the English lower classes have traditionally done to the extent they could, but were often prevented from doing. There’s a reason that poachers are often rural folk heroes.

Here in the US, there never were Royal Forests — indeed, the very word “forest,” which was originally borrowed into English from French to describe aristocratic game preserves, is for us simply a term meaning woodland, particularly if large. Hunting (especially large game) often requires a license, but this can be pretty cheap — based on a bit of poking around, it appears that in Michigan, a base license (which lets you hunt small game, and is also a prerequisite most of the other licenses) is $11 for a state resident, and deer licenses are $20 per deer, both for bucks and for does. I’m told that in some Southern states, doe tags can be as little as $5 each, as I referenced above.

AFAICT, the low end of realistic yields from an adult deer is about 35 pounds of boneless lean meat, and substantially higher is easily possible. So even buying only a single deer tag (here in Michigan), not shooting any small game, and shooting a relatively small deer, you’re still looking at less than $1 per pound.

Relatedly, I’ve been told that the word “hunting” actually means something different in the US and the UK, specifically that in the UK, it implies “on horseback, with dogs,” and generally for foxes (which are never eaten, correct?). Here, mounted hunting with dogs is rare even in the states that permit it, and so “going hunting” by default means “with a gun,” or, more rarely “with a (cross)bow,” and usually for animals that one intends to eat at least the tastier portions of. Dogs are sometimes used to track, flush, or tree various animals (birds, raccoons, boar, etc.), but the kill is still made with a bow or a firearm, and 44% of American households own one or more dogs (more in rural areas).

My impression is that there are types of hunting that have “wealthy recreation” associations here, even apart from English-style horse-and-dog fox hunts. Going hunting for bighorn sheep, say, at least if you don’t live in an area that has them. Deer hunting and turkey hunting are practiced by individuals from a variety of backgrounds, but I strongly suspect they skew poor relative to the population as a whole. Raccoon, possum, and squirrel hunting are definitely “rural poor” activities, even if they’re sometimes practiced by wealthier folks who are still culturally working class and rural as well.

Are you nightposting in the afternoon?

yes

(clarification: “as American as Apple Pie”, often phrased as “Apple Pie is an American institution”, contrast with the other sense of “a place where you cannot microwave a burrito at midnight”.)

Clever.

Good advice if you choose to take it.

Alternative solution: Stand and fight.

You can use the little bubbles button if you enable the new lab Tumblr has. It shows you the reblogging tree of posts, you can get the big blogs that way.

Fighting tends not to work, usually just ignoring online BS works better. Trolls don’t fight in good faith, so no matter what you do they’ll keep at it. Talking to the reasonable people, sure, but if there’s any whiff of belittling or not even bothering to understand, to find out what’s going on, then no, don’t engage. 

I don’t necessarily mean arguing the point, although I think that’s actually still useful for convincing third parties, who are usually what’s most at stake in even good-faith arguments. I just mean … fight. Do the internet equivalent of telling any of the harassers who get in your face or your way to back the fuck off, and then slugging them if they don’t. (And if any of them take it into meatspace, do the thing itself.)

I get really little anon hate, compared to some people I know who are much less verbally aggressive and somewhat closer to the orthodoxy that people are attacking them for violating than I am. And I think it’s not despite that fact, but because of it: Assholes send “you’re a disgusting transphobic/homophobic/racist/misogynistic/[insert variety of “oppressive” of choice here] shitlord; kys” messages to people they expect to actually suffer emotionally as a result. If they know that you’re response is going to be “Coming from a worthless shitstain like you, I’ll consider that accusation a badge of honor. Shitlord power, now and forever!” they’re a lot less likely to pick you for a target.

I interact less with people who are targeted heavily by far rightists, but my impression is that a similar principle applies: If you respond to “[applicable slur]s like you should be lynched” with “Let’s see you try; I wanna test out some new hollowpoints, and ballistic gel is expensive,” you’re a lot less likely to be targeted again than if you express fear or self-doubt.

it’s when you’re discussing how much you hate all members of group A and a person from group A is like “hold up, what?”

Okay, I laughed at that one.

To answer OP, the term is one of those SJ terms that is so easily prone to abuse that it’s poor epistemic or political hygeine or something to use it, because it can basically be used to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

its explicit purpose is to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.

The source is, in fact, a comic in which someone is talking, in public, about how awful sealions are, and a sealion demands that they justify that assertion, and refuses to go away until they do. Which is, you know, entirely fucking reasonable, but is implicitly depicted as itself justification for the original assertion.

I thought it was the “just asking questions” in bad faith, interpreting things as badly as possible, where the point is to get the person they don’t like to give up and snap (although obviously any term can be twisted and used badly itself). Like how terfs tend to be about trans people, so they’d be the ones sealioning at the trans people. 

This is the original comic:

Note how it begins with the woman publicly insulting an entire group, and how the sea lion never gets a chance to interpret anything in the worst light, because she never actually answers the question, not even to say “I will not; I am indeed unwilling to provide a defense of my statement to you.” It is true that the animal is portrayed as invading her house. But in practice, that analogy is consistently used by people who accuse others of “sealioning” with respect to “sea lions” responding (insistently) to public posts on social media, which is not remotely the same thing. That detail is itself a libel.

And, indeed, the author publicly responded approvingly to feminist use of the term to describe “harassment” in the form of demanding, online, that people justify insulting things they have said about the individual making the demand, or groups that they belong to. He even made shirts to celebrate it.

If someone is arguing in bad faith, you can accuse them of arguing in bad faith, and give reasons why. The purpose of the term “sealioning” is to define people arguing certain positions (essentially, any sort of defense of (any) anti-feminists, anti-sj cursed soldiers, gamergaters, sad puppies, or anyone else the anti-social and unjust “social justice movement” has decided are the enemy) as arguing in bad faith by definition, so that their arguments can be dismissed out of hand, and the people making them comfortably labeled as evil bigots.

It’s a kafkatrap: Arguing innocence is taken to be proof of guilt.