In the past couple months and on a couple of stress-inducing occasions my personal account, the one where I use my real name and am connected to friends and colleagues, has gone modestly viral.
The cycle always goes something like this: I post an observation. Not opinion. Not speculation. Not interpretation. Just a note about the increase in the price of gasoline, or a mention of seeing something at the grocery store, or noting that so-and-so politician made a contradictory statement.
Likes follow.
Then many likes follow onward, and soon people are reposting, sharing, and adding comments.
And then the trolls arrive and always offer the same argument: I must be woke. (Proudly empathetic, I’m fine with that.) I must be a libtard. (If the opposite is fascist, then I’ll wear that label, too.) I must be a loser who lives in his mom’s basement. (Hmm. Far from it.)
In the parlance of the logical fallacy, these are known as ad hominem attacks: when you can’t refute the argument, you undermine the person making them. You dehumanize. You delegitimize. You mock, rail, and poke holes in the person—because attempting to crush the truth of the statement is either too difficult or impossible.
When you don’t have facts on your side, you vilify those who do.
On my personal social account I don’t tolerate people who don’t tolerate me, so I am very liberal… about blocking them, that is. My experience has been that people who only know how to debate character have no real grasp of the facts they are defending, and thus rarely worth debating.
I have started to think of them as hockey team problems: people who defend the team they have always defended no matter how badly the team plays. To them it only matters what jersey you wear, who you root for, that defines the value of the argument. It is all the same, and loyalty is based in colour and label not in logic. Half my family hates the Oilers, where in our house we cheer them. Why do they hate them? Simply because they live in Calgary. It’s geographic, and no other reason exists if all honesty is on the table.
And, of course, in sports that’s fine. It’s fun. We all do it.
But in politics it is backwards and an oversimplification of how the world should work. Where in sports fist-shaking at the rival team is simple rivalry, in real life this approach is little more than a collapse of logical thought and a failed approach to rational argument.