I was never a fan of debate in high school. I did manage to win one debate in competition, the only one that mattered to me, against an arrogant blowhard I knew through 4-H who tended to whine (literally, and then he would say “I don’t whine!” in an extremely whiny voice) when he didn’t get his way.
My tongue has been quicker than my brain for a big part of my life, even before I had a stroke (I still have nightmares of that seventh-grade spelling bee when my tongue said “U” instead of the correct “W” my brain insisted on), so extemporaneous speaking was never my forte (improv acting is another thing altogether, as I’m not being myself; it’s far easier to circumvent that broken synapse when pretending to be someone else). I communicate much better in writing.
Not that the trolls think so. Cue my friend Snek Man rolling his eyes after he told me not to mention them. Sorry, dude, but I want to talk about logical fallacies (something I first became acquainted with through debate), and it’s kinda hard not to mention trolls when talking about them, since they illustrate them so well.
HubSpot defines logical fallacies as “deceptive or false arguments that may seem stronger than they actually are due to psychological persuasion, but are proven wrong with reasoning and further examination. These mistakes in reasoning typically consist of an argument and a premise that does not support the conclusion.”
There are a lot of different kinds, but I’ll just hit some of the most common ones here.
There’s the ad hominem attack, which trolls haul out for everyone with whom they disagree … because it’s easier to insult the person than to actually address their argument. And it makes the devilish little sister in me want to ask them how the mean lady columnist hurt them … just before reminding them, yet again (because they constantly misrepresent her words), that disagreement is not what makes one a troll.
It’s the exhibition of deliberate behaviors meant to disrupt discussion, such as posting off-topic, outrageous, inflammatory and/or offensive things in order to bait people into arguments, that do that. Given an environment where they don’t have to face accountability for their words, such as anonymity and little chance of punishment (say, Twitter/X or a lightly moderated newspaper comment board), trolls flourish. That means civil discussion becomes nearly impossible and those who actually want that go elsewhere (like Threads or a moderated blog).
Funny how that works.
Tu Quoque, or “you too,” rejects an argument because the person using it doesn’t practice what they preach (or because the person rejecting the argument believes, often without proof, that the first person is a hypocrite), dismissing it out of hand even if that person is actually making an effort toward, say, reducing her carbon footprint though she has to work with what’s available at the time (ahem, Greta Thunberg and every other climate activist who can only work with what they have).
Red herrings are also tossed around a lot in an effort to sidetrack people with irrelevant issues so that they’ll forget the original issue hasn’t been settled. The Gish gallop is similar, in that often irrelevant issues are introduced, but at a massive rate; with so much information given (most having nothing to do with anything discussed), the aim is to bury opponents in a preponderance of data and make it impossible to answer every point. If any point is ignored, the galloper declares victory.
False equivalencies are a favorite among hyperpartisans, especially when discussing things like Jan. 6, 2021, and, say, the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations, basically comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there were both peaceful protesters and violent rioters at both, but other than that, they’re not that similar, especially when you examine their goals and how they went about trying to achieve them. Calling attention to police and political corruption through protest (mostly peaceful) is different from forcibly entering the Capitol to stop a constitutionally mandated process (and compiling slates of false electors to help in that, plus threatening public officials and vandalizing and stealing government property isn’t exactly kosher either. And again, as soon as rioting and looting break out, it’s no longer a peaceful protest, but an illegal action.
Strawmen are misrepresentations or oversimplifications of an opponent’s argument, done to make it easier to refute (and hoping that no one noticed the little bait and switch), rather than fully addressing the issue, so they can claim a superficial victory.
Whataboutism is the practice of responding to an accusation by raising a counter-accusation or different issue rather than actually address the original accusation. The 2016 presidential race was full of this, as Hillary Clinton made for an easy target. (What about Benghazi? What about her emails? Or my favorite version of that one, “But her emails,” misheard as “buttery males.” Yes, I’m easily amused sometimes.)
The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is based on the idea of someone shooting randomly at a barn, then drawing a bull’s-eye around the largest cluster of shots to make people believe they’re a sharpshooter. When you overemphasize data similarities and ignore the differences (cherry-picking the data that best sells your argument; don’t get me started on how statistics can be skewed to prove just about anything), you’ve just painted a bull’s-eye.
And one more: Hasty generalization is drawing a conclusion on not enough evidence. We see this all the time in the arguments that all liberals love abortion (seriously?) and all Republicans are anti-government (really?). At times, this can be related to the correlation-causation fallacy (when people assume cause and effect from simple correlation; you may wake up with a headache after sleeping with your shoes on, but that doesn’t mean sleeping with your shoes on is the cause of the headache).
Maybe that headache is from your better half smacking you in the head because you went to bed with your shoes on.
You can find more logical fallacies at sites like Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies, Logically Fallacious, the University of Texas at El Paso, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, among others.
So what can you do with this information? Call out the people who use and abuse these arguments. Identify the flaw in reasoning, then move the discussion back to the original question. Give them another chance to debate honestly.
And if they won’t? Ignore them. Feeding the trolls is just asking to give up your peace of mind for their entertainment, and they’re not worth it.
Serenity is a fuzzy belly 