[Transcript]
Charming people. /s
I can tell you from experience that Cowbee is by far the most abusive person to argue with online I have ever encountered. And I love arguing online so I’ve met a lot. I blocked them a long time ago and seeing them in a screenshot still makes me shudder. Terrible humans
Cowbee is frustrating, but he’s easy to counter once you realise his spiel.
Extremeists rely heavily on gish-gallop, bombarding you with nonsense. You need to focus on the weakest claim, point out the bias or flaw in the source, and play for neutrality and impartiality; they’ll crumble every single time.
For example, when presented with an obviously biased source like Prolewiki or Redsails, or whatever copy-paste nonsense they have, ask for something more neutral and professional in tone, such as Reuters, AP News, or a neutral article.
You are biased, your source is biased, I am intimidated by BBC, here is a far more reliable source from suckingstrongmansdick.slop that shows the T-14 Armata will solve world hunger.
Or something along those lines. I try from time to time. But am very quick to give up. So I do my part by making fun of them and donate to a good cause, which somehow makes them sooooooo angry. I wonder why.
(Source.)
I have witnessed some truly nauseating toxicity on webshites like Argue With Everyone (rot in piss), 4chan, Facebook, and so on, and to call @Cowbee@lemmygrad.ml, of all people, ‘by far the most abusive person to argue with online I have ever encountered’ suggests that this user has not been on the Internet for a long time.
Oh, and I love the dullard who ridiculed us for disliking the BBC, never mind mediocre capitalist media like Reuters and the Associated Press. /c/MeanwhileOnGrad, you fucking suck.
Many of the users there insist that they aren’t anticommunists, only anti-Bolsheviks or ‘antitankies’ who arrived at the facile conclusion that the people’s republics never evolved into communism. Some of the users would even go so far as to argue that we are the anticommunists for defending states that (sometimes) suppressed ultraleftists. It’s a very unsophisticated way of thinking that is only mildly more complex than ‘I know you are but what am I’. (Although I do agree that the people’s republics could be too harsh on ultraleftists.)
The problem originates with a lack of theory, and the fact that you can’t just tell them to “read theory,” because they won’t. They don’t understand what class is or what socialism looks like in concrete reality, they coast by on vibes and pop-culture ideas of socialism. The difficulty rests in being able to explain that socialism is a mode of production by which public ownership is the principal aspect, and the working classes control the state, and doing so in a concise yet detailed enough manner that actually gets the ideas across solidly. I used to quote theory to try, but that never worked unless they had already read some theory, which is very few anti-communists.
Then there are the die-hard social fascists like PJ that call any socialist state “fascist,” and just mock you for providing reciepts.