this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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I had someone get in my DMs on another site and the way they interacted made me question what humans are. They refused to let me actually talk about the argument that they were making or paraphrase anything because I was "putting words in their mouth" to literally just describe their position. And I don't mean that I called them a bourgeois chauvinist supporting white supremacy, I literally mean describing something on the most basic level of "The Earth is round" being a claim about astronomy, or "Evolution is impossible" being a biological claim. No, I was just putting words in their mouth and avoiding talking about the subject itself. I cannot stress enough that I made a claim of exactly that structure and somehow got that response, and then only got doubling-down after that.
I know complaining about an internet argument is lame as fuck, but I seriously was baffled by it in a way that I can't even begin to articulate, and that's despite the fact that assessing arguments is probably one of the only things that I'm genuinely good at, and trying to understand motivated reasoning is one of my biggest interests. Like, their actual position was just dogwater chauvinism and not remotely interesting, but the way that they talked about it has put a fucking parasite in my brain.
I think this is different, although I'm pretty partial to complaining about internet arguments so maybe I'm biased but I think it's valuable to examine what's going on in culture and to discuss the trends. If you're going online to do victory laps or to lick your wounds over an internet argument then that's pretty cringey but if it's in service of making sense of culture and discourse or furnishing people with arguments then it takes on a very different quality.
I've had the same experience you've described and I think it's a manifestation of that siege mentality that I didn't do a good job of describing above, and it's happened more often than for it to be some random event.
I can't remember the exact discussions but as an example, someone makes a statement and I'll ask them if they agree/disagree with an uncontroversial premise. Not like "So you think killing is wrong, that means you wish that Hitler never died. You're a Nazi sympathizer." kind of thing but like "So if there are colors that exist outside the visible spectrum, do you agree that humans aren't able to accurately experience all of reality because the inherent limitations of our biology?" sort of thing.
And I've had multiple people flip out and accuse me of putting words in their mouth. My guy, I'm literally asking you a question - that's the opposite of putting words in your mouth. Usually I'm trying to assess whether it's worthwhile continuing the discussion or I'm trying to establish a foundation of points we agree upon so we can understand each other better, I'm not trying to "trick" you into saying the "wrong" thing.
I think it's partly to do with how polarized the mainstream discourse and mainstream politics has become, partly to do with people being victims of debate pervertry (unironically), online culture being absolute garbage, and beneath it all I think it's only capable of existing due to how hyper-alienated and atomized people are; if you have a community of people who value you and respect you then you're gonna be pretty insulated from what some internet stranger thinks of you but if you're really lacking in connection and community then you're gonna be much more liable to amplify the importance of internet exchanges and you're gonna feel like it's life-or-death so you're gonna respond that way. I'm not trying to be unsympathetic here and to tell people to just log off, although it would go a long way, but I see it as largely being a symptom of being socially disconnected and, to put it bluntly, a symptom of a fundamentally unwell society.
I mostly agree, though for reasons that I mostly hadn't given you I think in the case I was talking about, as I think about it more, I have a really strong feeling that this person in my story was themselves a (very bad) debate pervert rather than just a victim of one.
This is highly speculative of me, but I struggle to make another coherent picture: I feel as though the issue is that they're the sort of debate pervert who wasn't actually in a debate club or who studied philosophy or even really studied anything at all, but literally are just a fan of Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk and want to act out the spectacle of being a debatelord without remotely understanding how people communicate even for the purpose of abusing good faith to harm people or something like that. One of the biggest problems with this is that these videos always model the debatelord having total control over the conversation all throughout, because times where they didn't have total control were simply edited out. As you and I know, this is not how real arguments (let alone conversations) normally go, even when one side is plainly superior to the other, so it just sort of broke down over an incredibly mundane conversational element because they were unprepared to actually talk to someone, they were only prepared to perform in an "SJW owned" stage play that they decided to cast me in for some fucking reason. There is no other human with their own agency, just an NPC for you to perform combos and trickshots on.
I was reminded so much of "The Look" from Sartre, where the voyeur enjoys viewing others in secret, but feels horribly self-conscious when they realize that they too were being watched, because now they must confront themselves as an object of someone else's perception rather than an invisible subject for whom others are merely something to be unilaterally experienced. The difference here of course is that our new voyeur can fully make eye contact with people and still not see their humanity such that they are confronted with self-consciousness, it requires intervention on the part of others to break them from this blissful self-obliviousness and even then, they first resist it with a siege mentality like you describe before ever confronting such a thing. So it's not just mere intervention, but effectively being overpowered, at least momentarily.
Of course, this nonetheless produces your conclusion:
But again, this is extremely speculative and basically just my feelings on this after spending too long trying to make sense of it and failing to produce a good answer.
You've gotta trust your instincts on these things.
This is such a good way of putting it.
Ultimately you're never gonna know exactly what was motivating that behavior in them and you'll sooner go mad trying to make sense of it than you will arriving at a comprehensive and accurate understanding of it.
There's another aspect I didn't really go into where online discourse has degraded to often being symbolic, both in the sense that you've described above and in the sense of "I depicted you as the soyjak..." So much of what I see being used as placeholders for arguments that are articulated is "This is x" but people aren't able to provide their justification for it and it's just devoid of substance. I think that's partly due to people not being expected to write out a decent essay justifying their take on a novel or movie in school anymore, partly due to the internet culture becoming very siloed into echo chambers so people become accustomed to getting praise and validation because they can just say something like "Vaush Derangement Syndrome" and they collect dozens of upvotes for just invoking the same old tired trope (algorithms have a lot to answer for in this respect), and partly because they aren't capable of doing more than vibes-based analysis. (I'm gonna sound curmudgeonly, and maybe I am, but it feels like the art of discussion is becoming endangered.)
There was that video that dropped recently where some content creator on the progressive left claimed in a video essay that a few figures were "recruiting leftists to become Nazis by using dogwhistles." Big if true. Now I'm loath to entertain peak breadtuber pseudointellectual content stretching where they read through a paraphrasing of the Wikipedia entry on dogwhistles and fascism but this creator made the accusation that The Kavernacle, amongst others, was a cryptofascist who was turning people into fascists. Their argument amounted to nothing besides "He has a colonizer accent, he speaks with a flat affect, and he interrupts his girlfriend on streams [with the implication that this is domestic abuse]". There wasn't any attempt to make criteria for the argument and to show how it was being met, it was basically just being asserted as self-evident fact.
I'm not a huge fan of The Kavernacle - he's fine, just a bit 101 for my tastes and kinda uninteresting to me. But at no point did the creator elaborate how he was using dogwhistles or how you can turn a leftist into a Nazi by using dogwhistles or how he was a Nazi himself. It was all just throwing out buzzwords and doing really loose association (which is a charitable way of putting it because there basically wasn't any through line at all imo.) He did use the term "Nebula elite" to refer to people like Lindsey Ellis in one tweet, which honestly is a pretty fucking accurate assessment, and the closest thing to an argument was that this is a dogwhistle because using the word "elite" here is basically invoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish elite globalists control the world. If The Kavernacle actually did make positive or veiled references to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion or something then I'd be more sympathetic to the argument but instead the next thing they very heavily implied was that this is basically him wanting to put Jews on trains to Auschwitz. The connecting thread between this argument was so tenuous that it might have not existed but it was brain-melting to see people praising the analysis because they basically just did the verbal equivalent of pointing to a picture of The Kavernacle then to a picture of the cover of The Protocols then to a picture of Auschwitz then nodding emphatically.
It's pretty shocking to see people agree with things just because it feels truthy and salacious.
My take on this is that if you're capable of being converted into becoming a fascist just because someone used dogwhistles on you then you have zero political principles. Ironically, the people who were won over to the idea that this is a real and significant enough phenomenon on the left worthy of being discussed were the ones who were being convinced of a political position based on vapid symbolism and thus they're probably the most likely candidates for having their own political position subverted through the strategic use of dogwhistles. But I don't think any of them are ready to hear that take.
I think this sort of thing happens not because people actually "agree" with it, but because they don't like a person, and the liberal worldview doesn't allow for nuance. So if someone is "bad" they are all bad things at once, including a nazi. So this person making this video did not set out from a position of "I discovered an awful truth about this person and need to share it with others." but "I don't like this person and I want others to hate them, so I'll look for something I can accuse them off that shuts down discussion."
You see this a lot with online drama stuff, one party will accuse another of doing something beyond most people's "moral event horizon" in order to shut down discussion, not facilitate it. The people who watch this video can then just insist that this Kavernackle guy is a "nazi" and "why would you support a Nazi?" since liberals (currently) think nazis are bad, they will just agree with the accusations to avoid looking like a nazi sympathiser. It's something CHUDs have figured out about liberals for a while now, which is why they always accuse them of things like domestic abuse or animal abuse, because they know it is something that will just completely shut down a discussion about a person, because no one wants to defend an animal abuser. And they don't "believe" it, but they know if they repeat it enough, people will internalise it and it will cause the damage to their target's reputation that they want.