Lauren Davis of io9 has a collection of internet comics that, she claims, “shut down terrible internet arguments.” I suppose that depends on your definition of “shutting down.” If that just means “insult and dismiss the person you’re arguing with,” then sure, those comics are very effective. They suggest the superiority of the people who agree with them with maximum derision and haughtiness. (They include, of course, a comic from xkcd, which covers a lot of different topics but has essentially only one main idea, which is that the guy who writes it and the people who share it are better than everyone else.) But if your interest was to actually prevent the proliferation of the bad argument, through convincing the people who espouse it, they’re terrible. Because people do not respond to pedantry and they don’t respond to ridicule and they don’t respond to superiority. They just don’t. That’s not how humans work.
This past semester I had the great pleasure of having lunch with Dan Fagin, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Toms River, about the environmental and health impacts of a major chemical plant in New Jersey. Fagin is a talented and experienced science communicator. We were talking about the effort against global warming. One of his points is that far, far too much climate scientists and their liberal political allies communicate about climate change aggressively and derisively, which simply does not work. Adults really do not like the sensation that they’re being educated by another adult, particularly one that attacks their various communal and affinity groups. So the question becomes, do you care enough about slowing global warming to drop the psychically satisfying routine of ridiculing people with whom you disagree?
I can’t find it now (edit: here), but some Facebook friends of mine last year were sharing a comic about white privilege that was essentially the “argument through aggressive disdain and ridicule” thing to the absolute zenith. It literally ended with a cartoon character looking into the frame and saying “fucking educate yourselves!” to its implied audience. Let me assure you of something: no one, in the history of persuasion, has ever been persuaded by someone indignantly ordering them to educate themselves. Telling people to educate themselves in that manner is essentially ensuring that they won’t. At some point you have to decide if you’re more invested in the fun of feeling righteously superior or the actual need to convince others.
