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I remember being very confused by the reaction to this when it first appeared. My initial reading was that the first line is meant to be analogical with racism,

I remember being very confused by the reaction to this when it first appeared. My initial reading was that the first line is meant to be analogical with racism, since the speaker holds an irrational prejudice against a particular biological category. When questioned on it, they refuse to explain or apologise! It took me a while to grasp the alternate reading in which the sea lion is more like a subculture, such as "gamers" or "Bernie bros" or whatever.

sgt101 6y ago
It's intellectual violence which consumes the time of people of good intent by insisting that they do significant labor to support elements and details of an argument that are generally held to be self evident and true. Things like racism are included - for example "the KKK is a terrible organisation that hurt many people"... "have you got personal experience of this?".."how many KKK attacks have there been in Suffolk England this year?".."what percentage of KKK members have participates in racial murders".."are you sure that the murders are all actually terrible - maybe there were reasons - afterall we weren't there"... and so on and so on and so on...
- JasonFruit 6y ago
  Renaming disagreement, even in bad faith, as "violence" is unnecessarily tendentious and weakens the concept of actual violence. It colors and lessens the effect of the rest of what you said, which is all just fine. I find that a far more bad-faith technique of discussion than sealioning.
- hirundo 6y ago
  To call it intellectual violence tends to justify the use of force to oppose it. And it softens the definition of violence by inappropriate analogy. Even in the extreme case you describe, and even assuming that such questions are insincere (which I don't), it's still only rude and annoying behavior, far from violence.
kethinov 6y ago
I've never been a fan of the term sea lioning precisely because of that characteristic of the comic. People who expect to go through the world declaring strong opinions and then immediately refusing to explain it or engage with counterarguments are pretty annoying too. Imagine this conversation: A: "Ruby has better performance than Node.js!" B: "I hadn't heard that, can you provide some evidence of this claim?" A: "Shoo, troll! Being asked to provide evidence is harrassment! Stop sea lioning me!" A bit of a caricature, but I've seen plenty of conversations that follow that basic structure. In that case, person A is the troll, not person B.
- notahacker 6y ago
  The original comic is pretty clear that it's the repeated attempts to engage with someone clearly uninterested in debate "Aha! A whole day has passed and you have provided no evidence of the superior performance of Ruby on the other thread." that marks the sealions out. The other side to the comic is that the original throwaway remark sounds a bit hard to justify, until we see the sealions. Anybody who's ever made a throwaway remark about how X is like a cult or Y has obsessive fanboys and got bogged down in replies from people politely insisting actually we're completely normal, now please refute all 27 points about why X and Y are better can relate... Also its a Godwin-law type internet regularity, not a cast iron behavioural rule. Sometimes making comparisons to Nazis or calling out serial posters of provocative statements is actually appropriate
trabant00 6y ago
Your comment is delicious. You notice yourself it wouldn't be such a nice comment if it where made about a group you want to protect but it's perfectly fine if it is made about a group you dislike. Proving, again, "no bad tactics, only bad targets".
- rjknight 6y ago
  My comment says nothing about who I personally want to protect or dislike. I only describe my failure to guess how other people would react to the comic.

sgt101 6y ago

It's intellectual violence which consumes the time of people of good intent by insisting that they do significant labor to support elements and details of an argument that are generally held to be self evident and true. Things like racism are included - for example "the KKK is a terrible organisation that hurt many people"... "have you got personal experience of this?".."how many KKK attacks have there been in Suffolk England this year?".."what percentage of KKK members have participates in racial murders".."are you sure that the murders are all actually terrible - maybe there were reasons - afterall we weren't there"... and so on and so on and so on...

JasonFruit 6y ago
Renaming disagreement, even in bad faith, as "violence" is unnecessarily tendentious and weakens the concept of actual violence. It colors and lessens the effect of the rest of what you said, which is all just fine. I find that a far more bad-faith technique of discussion than sealioning.
hirundo 6y ago
To call it intellectual violence tends to justify the use of force to oppose it. And it softens the definition of violence by inappropriate analogy. Even in the extreme case you describe, and even assuming that such questions are insincere (which I don't), it's still only rude and annoying behavior, far from violence.

kethinov 6y ago

I've never been a fan of the term sea lioning precisely because of that characteristic of the comic. People who expect to go through the world declaring strong opinions and then immediately refusing to explain it or engage with counterarguments are pretty annoying too. Imagine this conversation: A: "Ruby has better performance than Node.js!" B: "I hadn't heard that, can you provide some evidence of this claim?" A: "Shoo, troll! Being asked to provide evidence is harrassment! Stop sea lioning me!" A bit of a caricature, but I've seen plenty of conversations that follow that basic structure. In that case, person A is the troll, not person B.

notahacker 6y ago
The original comic is pretty clear that it's the repeated attempts to engage with someone clearly uninterested in debate "Aha! A whole day has passed and you have provided no evidence of the superior performance of Ruby on the other thread." that marks the sealions out. The other side to the comic is that the original throwaway remark sounds a bit hard to justify, until we see the sealions. Anybody who's ever made a throwaway remark about how X is like a cult or Y has obsessive fanboys and got bogged down in replies from people politely insisting actually we're completely normal, now please refute all 27 points about why X and Y are better can relate... Also its a Godwin-law type internet regularity, not a cast iron behavioural rule. Sometimes making comparisons to Nazis or calling out serial posters of provocative statements is actually appropriate

trabant00 6y ago

Your comment is delicious. You notice yourself it wouldn't be such a nice comment if it where made about a group you want to protect but it's perfectly fine if it is made about a group you dislike. Proving, again, "no bad tactics, only bad targets".

rjknight 6y ago
My comment says nothing about who I personally want to protect or dislike. I only describe my failure to guess how other people would react to the comic.