The Death Of Argument, PT I

“Abortion is murdering babies.” “Men shouldn’t play women’s sports.” “Immigrants should come in legally or not at all.” “The vaccine kills more people than the disease.” “Eat bugs to change the weather lol.” “God says [Bible quote] so it has to be law.”

This type of statement is the bedrock of modern Right Wing discourse, and loyal readers know what word I’m going to use to describe it: dogshit. Absolute dogshit, if you will. Not just because their arguments have been long debunked, or because “I disagree with them”, but because the function of these specific types of one liners and gotcha statements is fundamentally counter to good faith discourse.

And they reveal the lie at the heart of modern Conservatism.

These are examples of bad faith protective or deflective thought terminating cliches, built around intractable, absolutist positions, presenting complex ideas as simplistic morality binaries. They are dead simple to memorize, to disseminate, to weaponize, and defend. They are notoriously difficult to refute, debunk, or challenge, and by the time any cogent response is levied, the moving target of this type of toxic bovine fecal matter is on to some other nonsense.

The formula is simple. It’s an appeal to emotion through personal morality, framed in such a way that the framing itself is the outer wall of the defense, surrounding a personal belief as fact. Because personal morality cannot be argued. It’s like arguing with someone about what their favorite cheese is. You can’t – de gustibus non disputandum est. However, this becomes fallacious when the subject is an argumentative reality that has evidentiary bases.

This is the fallacy on which this whole thing hinges: intractable, absolutist position framed as a moral binary. This is in no way good faith discourse, this is an attrition war between robust intellectualism and unwashed hordes of goatfucking shitbags addicted to online conflict where they just declare themselces the winner and block you before they are rebutted.

I outlined the “abortion is murdering babies” argument here. We can look through these others to see how this works, too. Trans women aren’t men, they’re literally women playing women’s sports. All pro and amateur sports have administrative bodies that have outlined their scientific and medical guidelines for all participants. But if one simply refuses to accept the correct framing, the moral binary of YOU WANT MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS is automatically on the defensive, is automatically the “immoral” choice.

“I think liking salad makes you a terrible person” shows the absurdity of this. It’s not an argument, there’s no evidentiary basis for it, and it puts the target under the onus to defend themselves as a not horrible person, or to decry salad. It’s a purely emotional tactic that has no place in civil discourse. “Eat bugs to change the weather” may be objectively funny, not gonna lie, but it’s 100% emotional deflection against one of the most existential threats all life has faced in thousands of years. Killing the planet to pwn the libs. Fucking dumbasses.

Online, the weaponization of these thought terminating cliches is massive. When you build a whole ass cult whose entire in-group identity is pwning anyone they can trigger, who don’t care at all about logic, reason, good faith discourse, truth, reality, humanity, or anything else (we’ll get into how NPD and cults in the future), feeding them pre-chewed tropes like this provides huge emotional utility.

And that’s the attraction here.

We see this as policy moves to fit the tropes: abortion bans without some kind of carve-out for rape victims and for the health of the parent would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. But as the benefits and positive outcomes from abortion access overwhelmed what few logical arguments existed in favor of them, the morality argument moved into this intractable, absolutist form. Instead of holding a nuanced view of the issue, and offering counterargument, they just made the policy fit the argument. No abortions, ever, for any reason.

Because that’s good policy? No. It’s so that they can continue to leverage a fucking gotcha meme to feed their sense of moral superiority. That’s it. That’s the whole burger. They don’t want to argue, they want to pwn. And they don’t give a single fuck about anything other than that.

“Freedom” and “my rights” and the like are also weaponized as moral binaries, but it’s functionally identical. “Freedom from regulation” has crashed the economy more times than I’ve seen 90’s classic Event Horizon. “Parent’s Rights” are aimed at dismantling a system that protects children from abuse. Same with “Men’s Rights”, especially in Family Court, where abusers still get custody of their kids 70% of the time. Bad faith framing, presenting a moral binary, as if shitty parents or shitty corporations or shitty men don’t exist.

Elon Musk went on rabid tirades against a California bill to keep school districts form passing laws that would mandate educators to inform parents of any deviation in gender expression or whatever nonsense these idiots think is going on. Framed as a “parent’s rights” issue, it fundamentally protects kids from anti-trans abuse from their lunatic parents like Musk, who famously claimed his child dead because she transitioned, and has been a whinging, dramatic child over the whole thing to the point of funding the Fascist takeover of the US because he’s an idiot baby addicted to getting his way on everything, but I digress.

Point is that these faux “moral binaries” are being leveraged by the least fucking moral people ever. See also: religious zealots and gamergate dudes. “Ethics in game journalism”, my guy, you got mad when Wolfenstein made Nazis the bad guys.

These types of positions range from Charlie Kirk’s inane Bible nonsense to Alex Jones’ gay frogs, from pregnant-wife-abuser-and-serial-penis-displayer-at-work (allegedly) Steven Crowder’s weird collegiate appearances to literally all of Fox News. The entire point of the Conservosphere media machine os to feed this emotional loop, and to provide the latest and greatest in pwnage porn to the smooth brained masses. It’s arguable that Tucker Carlson’s fall from top spot to twitter nobody is because he is no longer the one feeding them their shitty one liner arguments. Tucker no feed the feel good pwnage, Tucker go bye bye.

It’s mindbendingly insidious, and needs to be far more widely called out for what it is. We’re here because a bunch of weak willed ignoramuses care more about dunking on braniacs on the internet than they do, say, a million dead Americans, their Social Security, or watching the planet burn to death.

We’ll examine the more detailed outcomes of this strategy soon, but I wanted to expand on the last post about this a bit, because it’s vitally important for any real media literacy to recognize these shitbag tactics.

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