My experience is that the content of those arguments often doesn't matter. This sticks out to me particularly in music discussions because those discussions hav

My experience is that the content of those arguments often doesn't matter. This sticks out to me particularly in music discussions because those discussions have always had room for endless sanctimonious opinions. One of the most valuable things I read when I was younger on the Internet was a SomethingAwful columnist explaining how to be a fake music snob and pointing out that "people involved in music discussions don’t actually care what other people think, they’re merely concerned about the politics of domination and submission." It's not just music discussions: human discussions in general are prone to this, and when the discussion is really about the politics of domination and submission (a topic that people, usually correctly, care a whole lot about), the "real" subject matter of the discussion will become the building blocks of the social dominance exercise and its connection to the underlying thing will quickly be severed. There is no political tendency or fandom or faith that is immune to this, it's an emergent feature of humans' monkey brain hardware.