How to Defend the Indefensible
Machiavellian Argument Strategies
Image by Dall-E 3
I’ve got bad news and good news. The bad news is, you’ve painted yourself into a corner by committing yourself to a proposition which seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be true. It’s been so long since that trespass that you’ve built your identity around a lie, which is now a load bearing pillar. Too late, by far, to simply change your mind.
This unfortunately means that tools like reasoned argumentation, which you likely apply to great effect in all other areas of life, will not avail you here. This time, they are instead antithetical to your goals. Victory is the aim, not truth, which is merely a tool to be brought down from the shelf when it serves you and put back when it doesn’t.
The good news is, this is not a new problem. For as long as there have been humans, we’ve been going way out on epistemic limbs we shouldn’t have, tantalized by beautiful mirages which would be heartbreaking not to believe in. Or knowingly framing our worldview around some dubious conceit which stacks the deck in our favor, so we can have everything our own way.
Consequently our methods of manipulation, misdirection, deflection, damage control, containment, delaying, disrupting and justifying why we built such elaborate castles of conviction upon the clouds of assumption, have become impressively advanced throughout the course of history.
Because you’re starting out at a disadvantage, you’re going to need every edge you can get. This means exploiting every possible vulnerability and pushing the limits of what you can get away with. Truth is the enemy here, whether you realize it yet or not, perhaps still telling yourself you possess a vital hidden truth which just happens to be frustratingly difficult to defend.
If that’s the case, likely you’ve already been rug-pulled by someone who seems to you like an insufferable pencil-necked know it all. That’s how it feels to be outmatched, and it sure ain’t fun. What depths won’t you sink to, if it means shutting him up? Or better yet, making him squirm? In this endeavor, honesty, logic, reason, these are your enemies. Your allies are various forms of rhetorical trickery, damage control and linguistic hacking.
1. Gatekeep
As Sun Tzu would say, the best battle is the one you never have to fight, so prevent it from happening if you can. This means gatekeeping; Reduce as much as possible the number of people allowed to argue. Do this by insisting upon criteria which must be met before someone is eligible to dispute your claims.
Armchair psychiatry / invalidating the opponent’s motives constitute a form of gatekeeping. This is where you speculate derisively about their reason for disagreeing, as an alternative to rebutting their arguments.
Projecting a conflict of interest is another time tested method; “Men don’t get opinions on abortion” or “white voices aren’t welcome in discussions of racism” for example, or “of course a jewish/gay/trans person would deny Christianity, the yardstick by which they are measured deficient”.
Placing your claim outside the scope of acceptable debate also sometimes works, for example refusing to debate race or gender ideology on moral grounds.
2. Double Standards / Burden of Proof
This one’s related to gatekeeping, in that you construct a double standard which disqualifies your opponent (whose evidence must clear an infinitely high bar) but not you (for whom the bar is set much lower).
What you’re attempting here is to establish (as if it were unbiased) a set of goalposts actually reflective of your own inclinations toward your position and away from the opponent’s. Which is to say, setting the goalposts where the opponent would need to reach in order to persuade you, personally. The rub? It's impossible to satisfy (he he he)
For example, let’s say a Nigerian prince has emailed you out of the blue with a generous offer to share in his wealth. You’re excited by the prospect, it’s very desirable that it be true. When a family member cautions you that it’s likely fraudulent, you challenge them to search every square mile of Nigeria, to first confirm the prince isn’t there, before being so confident that he isn’t.
If he can't fulfill this condition, then you're right by default. Notice, at no point did you have to mount a defense of your own belief. If pressed, you could just point back to the email (which is technically some degree of evidence). Not good enough for him? That’s his problem.
This principle extends to the burden of proof; If aspects of your own position are unfalsifiable, that’s not your fault, it is what it is, and skeptics are being unreasonable in asking for evidence of something intrinsically impossible to provide evidence for. It is a problem not for your claim, but for any who dispute it. Whereas, any unfalsifiable aspects in your opponent’s position are shortcomings of the position itself, which challenge its credibility.
3. Thought Terminating Cliches
Next up, thought terminating cliches; moral condemnation as substitute for rebuttal. “You are racist/sexist/a religious bigot, therefore a moral monster and my lesser, undeserving of a dignified response. Thus, I need not explain why you’re factually wrong. ”
I would argue “Don’t erase my lived experience” as a means of defending blanket statements or anecdotes unsupported by statistics belongs under this umbrella, along with the entire concept of epistemic violence.
4. Accusations of Sealioning
That’s only one of many ways to shut down argument. Another is to position your belief as so thoroughly, exhaustively established, that nobody who questions it can possibly be doing so in good faith. (Related: “This is such an old debate, every argument has already been made, if my side didn’t voluntarily concede in all that time then it must be an unresolvable stalemate”)
The rub is, everyone views their beliefs this way. Any belief or system of beliefs with a large volume of apologetics (Many centuries worth, for Abrahamic religions) can point to it, implying your questions are already answered there, with the conceit that whatever answers apologists came up with are satisfactory rebuttals in the eyes of any reasonable person.
Often they don’t know if that’s true, never having checked, but rest on their confidence that it must’ve been addressed somewhere in there and it’s your job to look for it, not theirs to spoonfeed you. (see: The Runaround)
In this way, accusations of sealioning often amount in practice to “I don't want/have to defend my position because I consider it beyond reasonable doubt.” In some cases it is, but if so, one can establish it by argument unless they’re lazy.
This may include linking to curated collections of polemic as a labor saver, though an equally lazy challenger might try to restrict you to using only arguments written in your own words, an arbitrary rule simply meant to set up more hoops to jump through.
5. Don’t Let ‘em Speak
The goal here is to flat-out stop the other guy from talking by any means possible, so long as it doesn’t disqualify you as well (.i.e. Within the scope of the law and whatever debate rules apply).
Other options include censorship, deplatforming, protesting disruptively at public speaking events, and cutting his mic. It’s a big help if all administrative positions are occupied by people who share your beliefs, aka institutional capture. If not, it’ll be an uphill battle.
If you can’t silence him entirely, minimize how much time he can speak for; in televised unstructured debates, fill as much of the limited time with your own speech to reduce the time available for his, as damage mitigation. This is known in politics as the Filibuster.
If there’s a hard limit to how much interrupting/talking over your opponent the mediator will allow, try to ride right up against that line (if at all possible, ensure the mediator’s sympathetic to your views).
Gish Gallop is an example of this strat which also casts aspersions of inadequacy onto the opponent when they can’t answer every point raised, as the unspoken implication is that it’s because he hasn’t any rebuttals, rather than the lack of time.
6. Ridicule
Doesn’t it boil your blood how unfair it is that you’re chained at the ankle to a heartfelt belief which can easily be made to appear ridiculous if presented without nuance, while your opponent has no such loyalties to exploit? He’s twisting the knife by disputing a belief you’re emotionally invested in, do your best to hurt him back. See how he likes it!
Maybe it has never occurred to you that someone would dispute your beliefs for any reason other than to be deliberately hurtful. Even if it has, accusing him of that motive is a good way to stigmatize dissent. (See again: thought terminating cliches, moral disqualification)
Sometimes, simple laughter is enough to throw him off-balance. People bullied in their youths are especially prone to feeling self conscious and second-guessing their arguments with even gentle mockery, absent any explanation of what’s funny. But this is rarely enough on its own, as clowns laugh too.
Enter the physique check: Does he look funny? Is he fat? Does he wear glasses, or have crooked teeth? What shape is his jaw? Anything you sense he was likely bullied for growing up is a pain point you can press on. Mental illness doubly so, as you can use it to cast aspersions on the reliability of their reasoning, even if the impairment is not intellectual in nature.
If he objects that appearance (or neurodivergence) is unrelated to credibility, reply “that’s what a fatty (or whatever’s applicable) would say!” But beware, this is easily countered if many leading apologists for your cause are obese. Thomas Aquinas for Christians, as an example, or Chris Hitchens for atheists.
7. Virgin vs. Chad
Portray people who share your beliefs as ideal specimens to whatever extent you can without spelling it out (for optics reasons, explored later). Imply that gross, malformed, cringe, unfit people arrive at their opposing conclusion out of jealousy, bitterness, self-hatred, desire to sin, or some other deficit.
This will entice the ego of the audience, who may find appealing the prospect of adopting an identity associated with masculinity, fitness, sexual desirability and so on. Ego is the carrot, insecurity the stick, applying both suction and pressure to budge someone into making that assumptive leap they otherwise wouldn’t.
Of course all of this genuinely is unconnected to whether your position’s factual, but people aren’t purely logical robots, we’re emotional creatures who often believe things without good reason if our passions move us to. As such, we’re more susceptible than we think to manipulation tactics.
It’s staggering to think, but this is probably the single greatest motivating factor in how ages 13-25 identify. Insecure, unsure who they are, shopping for identities they can try on. Concerned less about what’s true and more with image. Just as there’s virtue signaling, there’s also masculinity signaling, intelligence signaling, etc.
This is how atheism became a cheap, easy way for midwits to put on intellectual airs between 2000 and 2010. It’s why the same age group today gravitated instead to TradCath larping, as that brand successfully marketed itself as “for based gigachads” and atheism as pretentious cringe.
8. Ideological Caricatures
That isn’t the only way to embarrass your opponent. There’s also ideological caricaturization, a form of strawman in which you assume the absolute worst of your opponent that you can plausibly justify. Attach to him every absurd, fringe excess of the party or ideology you associate with him, and act as though it was a reasonable suspicion anyone would’ve had.
“Well you’re a democrat, so naturally I figured you support castrating children” for example, or “You’re a Christian after all, so you probably believe Earth is flat.” This puts him in a hole he must climb his way out of rather than starting on even footing, wasting some of his time and potentially embarrassing or annoying him.
This is behind the phenomenon you may have observed online, wherein liberals refer to every conservative as a Nazi, and conservatives refer to liberals as Communists, when in reality most are much less extreme in their views than these labels suggest. This technique serves to put your opponent on the defensive straight away, so he wastes time setting the record straight rather than rebutting your claims.
It also may budge him in the other direction, or at least evens things out: “You believe weird things too”. In this way, excesses of one side constitute license for the excesses of the other. This is where you get into whataboutism, which very likely many reading this will internally engage in if they identify any of the tactics discussed so far as ones they have used. “Oh yeah well the other tribe does it too!” Comes as naturally as breathing.
9. Motte & Bailey
In some cases, you need not even authentically identify genuine hypocrisy to mount a seemingly credible accusation; it may instead be the false equivalence of a minimized, rationalized form of your position, and an exaggerated, caricatured version of his, in order to tip the scales.
An example of this would be compressing, reducing, and thereby fortifying Christianity by distilling it down to “The universe had to come from somewhere, there may be something greater than us out there, we should be kind to each other” when it’s under scrutiny. Likewise reducing holocaust denial to “Maybe it wasn’t exactly 6 million, the victors in war write the history”, etc.
Then, once it’s out of the spotlight, it unfolds/expands back into its less defensible form. Its claims once more sprawling and detailed (the bailey), going back out onto those epistemic limbs it retreated from while under the skeptic’s microscope.
This applies to many political propositions too, and more broadly just entails shrinking the scope of your claims to their most defensible form, something anyone would be hard pressed to dispute (the motte), in order to pass through the keyhole of critical analysis.
This strat is named for a type of medieval settlement consisting of a small but defensible fortress connected to a much larger, open air village. During raids, everyone retreats from the village because while they live there most of the time, it’s indefensible. They hole up inside the fortress on a hill, surrounded by a moat, only until the raiders leave:
10. The Runaround
So far we’ve covered the kinds of weaponized social technologies familiar to anyone who has ever set foot in a classroom, cafeteria, or playground. Kafka trapping is a well known example in this category, a kind of presuppositional framing. Less sophisticated, but also effective, is giving them “The Runaround”; To deliberately confuse/annoy them, waste time, & deter them from continuing.
Adjacent to the runaround is playing dumb; i.e. having the other guy spell things out which you know already and don’t even dispute, simply to increase his workload. Maybe you can’t win, but you can delay defeat, frustrate him and make him earn it.
One example of this is pretending not to know what per capita means when breaking violent crime down by demographic (or CSA perpetrated by clergy), because it turns numbers that look favorable for your position into ones which don’t.
You might also insist the rebuttal to their argument is found somewhere in large volumes of apologetics, privately knowing it isn’t (a Snipe Hunt), or that you’re overselling it; by the time he finds that out, you’ll have tricked him into reading hundreds of pages of apologetics, hopefully changing his mind. One may consider this the logical evolution of The Runaround.
11. Keep ‘em on the Back Foot
This one’s closely related to The Runaround, as well as Steering Discussion. It’s best summarized in the Church of Scientology’s mantra, “Always Attack, Never Defend”. Besides creating lots of work for your opponent, it keeps all the heat off your own back.
It doesn’t matter if your own position is flimsy, if you never allow it to come under scrutiny. Whereas even when defending strongly supported theories, one eventually runs out of answers to sustained questioning, simply because discussion reaches the current limits of human knowledge. It’s a bit like a boxing match won (slowly) by an emaciated beanpole because his opponent’s hands were tied.
A good example of this tactic is drilling an atheist on the basis for his morality (centuries worth of writings on moral philosophy) if the basis of your own morality is a god you cannot prove exists. In which case you haven’t got objective morality, but an argument that we’ll all be better off if everyone pretends.
12. Misdirection / Feints
The Fakeout is another related strat; If you seem eager to initiate a particular line of argument, the opponent will sense a gotcha coming and evade. However if you signal to him that it’s something you don’t want to discuss, he will smell blood in the water and pursue.
You can do this by posting a comment, letting him see it, then deleting it to arouse suspicion. The prospect of seizing upon a moment of accidental vulnerability will be too tantalizing to ignore. Even just deleting and reposting to correct a typo powerfully provokes this hopeful suspicion. In this way he will march confidently into your trap, believing it was his own idea to do so, and that he’s being terribly clever.
This is also straight out of the Art of War, tricking the enemy into attacking you where you’re strong, instead of where you are weak. I’d wager much of Sun Tzu’s writings could be applied to arguments as much as to warfare.
13. Parrot Loops
This one seems closely related to a bunch of these, I’m not sure where to place it. Probably there's an academic term for it but if so I don't know what it is, my attempts to pin it down are mainly vibes-based for the moment.
Here's how it works: On a public discussion platform, you ask "Why is it people from (group x) never understand (concept y)?’ This is the bait.
When members of that group reply, explaining why they hold the views on that topic that they do, you respond with “See what I mean?”
When they reply with indignation and further clarification of their reasoning, you simply repeat “See what I mean?”
The trap is sprung, though they likely don’t yet realize there’s no way out of this endless cycle of getting dunked on. Literally whatever they say, if you respond with “see what I mean” it perpetuates the impression that they’re only further proving your point. And it’s not reversible: Saying “see what I mean” back is nonsequitorial.
The cycle continues until the poor, trapped fool realizes the futility and cuts his or her losses. This is great as it requires no effort to actually address their arguments but gives the appearance that you have, or at least that you effortlessly parried them, like Neo deflecting Agent Smith’s blows with one arm.
It essentially automates argument, luring the opponent into an ass paddling machine which just keeps paddling their ass while they get madder and madder, unable to do anything about it. (Speaking of automating argument, a distressing number of people now simply copy arguments into ChatGPT, then copy back the answers it gives, using it as a prosthetic brain. This is demeaning and maddening to be on the receiving end of.)
I might also compare Parrot Loops to the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, wherein the titular character becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to fight an inanimate figure made from tar. Punching it only gets him more stuck/tangled up in the tar, and there’s no winning as it was never a genuine opponent to begin with.
14. Presuppositional Framing / Kafka Trapping
I touched on presuppositional framing earlier, giving Kafka trapping as an example. Just as the best battle is the one you prevent from happening, the second best battle is the one you win before it starts.
Presuppositional framing achieves this by subtly sneaking into the premise assumptions which lead inexorably to your desired conclusion, hoping the opponent does not notice them and consents to building upon the premise you supplied.
“When did you stop beating your wife”, the classic example of Kafka trapping, disorients, embarrasses, presupposes its own accusation, and is tricky to answer in a way which doesn’t look bad.
The Parrot Loop, I think, could be characterized as an evolution of Kafka Trapping. It shares the presuppositional framing, but introduces an accompanying rejoinder which perpetuates and reinforces the aspersions you mean to cast. This improves Kafka Trapping by making escape/reversal more difficult.
15. Kompromat
Better still, if you can dig up real dirt rather than inventing it. This brings us to kompromat, or “compromising information”, a time tested means of interpersonal leverage. The difficulty is in obtaining reliable, hidden information about a guarded opponent (aka “receipts”), of which they are ashamed. One method is simply to throw accusations at them until one sticks. See what they react to, which ones they don’t deny.
This is a powerful strat and a best case scenario for you, with the potential not just to silence an opponent, but to drive him into hiding, erasing all socials or even suicide. No argument he brings against you after exposure, however potent, will avail him; it can be instantly, devastatingly countered by simply reminding him and everyone present of his wrongdoing.
This represents permanent neutralization of what may have been a particularly formidable enemy, long a thorn in your side until then. Whatever arguments the opposing side of the issue brings forth in the future, they’ll have to be presented by someone else, hopefully less skilled in argument.
By the by, if they try this on you, DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim & offender) is an equally time tested rhetorical judo throw. However, ever-increasing public knowledge of therapy language might result in your opponent, or onlookers, calling you out on this, so weigh that risk. Which brings us to optics.
16. Optics
You must always be aware of how your strats appear to onlookers. Dirty tricks which are obvious as such may win the battle but lose the war, as you technically thwart your opponent, but turn all spectators against you and your beliefs. This is why violence is always an absolute last resort.
It’s terrible optics, handing tremendous leverage to your opponent. This affords your opponent instant victim status, and now they can say “See how the opponent persecutes me? That proves I’m right.”
If it does turn into a “who is the biggest victim” contest, you might consider performative offense/crocodile tears. But be aware, this works only for classes of people that we’re broadly prone to sympathize with. If you’re male and not gay or trans, or disabled, this strat won’t play well with the audience.
17. Sour Grapes
Now we come to evidence. Namely, what to do when you haven’t got any. Perhaps your religion has a central text, that counts as evidence to you. But other religions have their own books. Still, you feel “If that’s good enough for me, it should be good enough for him” and “that’s what I got, so it needs to be enough, and if it isn’t, that’s his fault”.
Enter: Sour Grapes. It goes something like “There’s no use showing you evidence anyhow. Even if I showed you a whole mountain of evidence, you still wouldn’t believe” says the guy with exactly the same level of evidence every other religion has, which was insufficient for him to believe in them.
This one’s adjacent to caricaturization, as in your thought experiment you’re assigning an unreasonable, unrealistic attitude to the opponent, imagining he remains stubbornly unconvinced even when shown overwhelming proof.
Your basis for believing he’s that stubborn is that he remains unconvinced in reality, outside your thought experiment, where in fact you have not shown overwhelming proof.
18. Hoaxes
One solution to lack of evidence is to make your own. Faith/politics promoting hoaxes have a long and storied history. A scattershot strategy, only a small percentage need to be well formed enough that they’re burdensomely difficult to discredit. Again, creating unpleasant, tedious work for your opponent. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, AI has made this easier than ever!
If he does put in the work to fact check you, or happens to know the disproof offhand, quickly jump ship to the next most defensible hoax. This mitigates damage from the loss, shifting focus, and he can’t discredit them all unless he does nothing else with his time (see: Gish Gallop)
19. False Flags
The opposite tactic is the false flag; rather than manufacturing evidence for your own side, manufacturing discrediting information/events you attribute to the opponent’s side. Some examples include the Cassie Bernall story, which was not retracted even after eyewitness Valeen Schnurr denied it happened as reported. It was too perfect as propaganda.
These are most well known from politics, typically many such stories will emerge around election time. Fakehatecrimes.org documents Jussie Smollet type incidents for example, and some reading this might remember stories about immigrants eating pets, or the woman who claimed Obama voters carved a “B” into her cheek.
The best false flag isn’t made up whole cloth, as the way to poison someone is to sprinkle a tiny amount of poison into a large amount of cake. Likewise, the most convincing lies are mostly true. This has the side bonus of making fact checkers appear pedantic for ruling your claim false, if only a small part of it is.
Twisting events slightly is a calculated risk, mind you; you’re relying on your opponent not knowing the specifics offhand or trusting you enough not to fact check. Creationist accounts of the Piltdown Man hoax are a good example (it was not created by scientists but by a con man tricking them for profit), quote mining Darwin absent context, or holocaust deniers mentioning swimming pools, wooden doors, orchestras and detached chimneys out of context.
20. Lies of Omission
This also applies to the middle-ground between the two approaches, the lie of omission. Say your opponent is an atheist asking for independent contemporaneous witnesses to the resurrection or any other miracles.
There are none, but if you can’t score a hole in one, get as close as possible and handwave to bridge the gap; You might mention Josephus, Tacitus or Pliny the Elder for instance, all of whom did write about Jesus.
Never mind that none were his contemporaries, all born well after the crucifixion. Never mind that none witnessed any miracles, only wrote that his followers believed he performed some. Your opponent might not know that, and assume you’re arguing in good faith, such that you wouldn’t float a lie experimentally like that to see if it slips past him.
If he doesn’t notice, that’s your green light to continue doing it, even getting bolder/more brazen. In this way, you can construct extensive, critical portions of your argument upon a foundation of unchecked falsehoods. Don’t try to get away with too much in this regard; if he eventually does notice you lied, he may go back and fact check every dependency in your reasoning up to that point.
The built-in fallback, if he does fact check you, is that these accounts at least prove Jesus existed (the motte). Assume he is a mythicist from the outset, in keeping with Ideological Caricaturization, because that’s a fringe and difficult to defend position you ought to hope he professes anyway. If he doesn’t, you might still annoy him into attempting a defense of it. (see: misdirection)
This works for all topics. Your opponent might not know that delousing chambers often were wooden with felt gaskets, because the gas inside was at ambient pressure, so rubber O-rings weren’t necessary to resist a pressure differential. He might not know that detached chimneys which connect to crematoria underground are a thing.
He might not know that Auschwitz wasn’t one camp but many, divided according to prisoner type and purpose, with Birkenau being the extermination center. Or that the “swimming pools” were firefighting reservoirs that aryan prisoners, mainly there for political dissent, were permitted to swim in if they performed kapo duties in complicity with camp operations.
He might not know the most widely circulated photo of a wooden office style door on a gas chamber wasn’t even from a German camp, that chambers were sometimes repurposed into additional bunker space near the end of the war, or that Zyklon B stains walls blue, but carbon monoxide (which was substituted in some chambers during shortages, and used throughout Aktion T4) does not.
He might not know that peace time cremation regulations weren’t observed, 2 or 3 emaciated adults could fit into a single oven or as many as 4 children, not accounted for in math purporting to show that so many bodies could not be disposed of in such a short time, or that ashes were often dumped into rivers rather than buried, and official numbers include rural killings outside camps by the Einsatzgruppen.
He might not know the orchestra was for the guards, not the prisoners, or that the musicians were shot if they performed poorly. And so on, and so forth, all possible blind spots you can exploit by presenting information out of context, framed in such a way as to lead your opponent to fill in the gaps with their own assumptions.
21. Cherry Picking
This one’s the kissing cousin of lying by omission; Not presenting all relevant evidence, but only what supports your premise, even if evidence against is much more numerous and of higher quality.
Examples of this can be found throughout the “scientific miracles of the Holy Quran” Youtube videos, which pick out passages possible to map to modern scientific knowledge via eisegetical contortion, ignoring the probable intent of the authors given historical context and any passages which indicate the opposite.
An example from Christianity is interpreting Isaiah 40:22 to refer to a spherical Earth, when “the circle of the Earth” could also mean a flat disc, which is consistent with scholarly understanding of the ANE (Ancient Near East) cosmology common to Egypt, Babylon and the Levant.
This is often presented alongside Job 26:7 which states that the Earth hangs upon nothing, as the two can be mapped superficially to modern models of the solar system if one pointedly ignores all other verses mentioning the firmament / vault of heaven, affirming it’s hard and metallic (Job 37:18) rather than being the atmosphere.
Likewise seizing upon the dual meanings of yom/yamim as days or indeterminate work periods to reconcile 6 day creation with the modern scientific understanding of deep time, when early in Genesis light is separated from darkness, with the light being named day (yom) and the dark being named night, where each “yom” is then followed by evening and morning.
22. Steering discussion
If all else fails, you can attempt a forcible subject change. Not ideal, as if you foresee the need, there are subtler methods of steering the conversation, but phrases like “That’s not important/I don’t care about/I don’t see why” can be employed, as if only details you personally deem “important” could be relevant to the final analysis. Likewise “That’s not the point” (I decide what the point is). This dovetails back into presuppositional framing, with the unspoken assumption that the values by which you decide what topics are relevant or irrelevant are universal and objective.
Speaking of, if you’re outmatched and want a way out while saving face, you might deliberately steer the argument into a circle. Then you can say “See, we’re arguing in circles now” implying he’s the reason for that.
This strat shares some DNA with “This is an old argument, everything’s been said already” from the sealioning section, as well as “Neither of us is going to change the other’s mind” (You won’t concede because you’re stubborn, he won’t concede because you haven’t supported your claims. But you can use this phrase to equivocate.)
23. Denying the Antecedent
This one’s a bit abstract, I didn’t know how to weave it into the larger progression of tactics so I slapped it on the end. The politically neutral example AI gives is “When someone concludes that the "then" part of an "if-then" statement is false because the "if" part is also false. It's like saying, "If it rains, the game is cancelled. It didn't rain. Therefore, the game is not cancelled”.
The much less neutral example, very commonly seen on social media these days, happens when one person says "Only women can give birth" and a TRA replies "So women who can't give birth aren't women?"
Adjacent to playing dumb, the opponent here pretends they don’t understand the structure of the claim; that the set of people able to give birth contains only biological women, which does not preclude that some people falling outside that set are also women. Like “Some humans have one leg, thus humanity isn’t bipedal”.
It also excludes outside context informing the topic, namely that humans are mammals, which are reproductively binary. The ambiguity is a mirage created by unwillingness to use the word “defect”; infertile women still have wombs, albeit nonfunctional, and it’s not some big mystery how those are normally supposed to work.
24. Outspend / Outgrow / Outlast
These aren’t argumentation strats per se, but strats for how to win without having to argue, or even shut down argument. This is for when all other tactics have failed. You’ve given up on stumping or even embarrassing naysayers, now searching instead for a plan B that achieves more or less the desired outcome anyway: More people who share your views.
Outspend means to amass wealth from fellow supporters of your cause, and put it into commissioning impressive monuments, temples and works of art glorifying your beliefs. (“Cultural victory” in the Civilization games)
This won’t sway adults alive now, unless they’re very impressionable. But children born to fellow adherents will grow up in an environment where they’re constantly surrounded by reminders of your belief. It will seem so embedded into art and culture as to fade into the background, the very framing of their reality which goes unexamined by design.
Outgrow means what you probably suspect: Have lots and lots of children. Or, gain access to other people’s kids and persuade them of your beliefs, handy if those beliefs are antithetical to reproduction for whatever reason.
Leverage communal support structures and mutual aid to manage the resource burden of so many children. Childcare is expensive, but you have plenty of well meaning warm bodies willing to volunteer their time for the cause.
In this way, though you might not be able to persuade anyone else of your views, you may instead simply make new people who will be raised not knowing any competing ideas exist until well into adulthood.
Outlast means for your community of like minded people to outlast skeptics and proponents of contrary beliefs. If you practice Outgrow consistently, then over a multigenerational timeframe you can simply wind up outnumbering everyone who disagrees with you. The tail wags the dog, as what began as a fringe group of loonies becomes the de facto mainstream. You’ve just gotta keep at it until competitors and naysayers have gone extinct. Ever heard of Mithraism, or Manichaeism? No? Exactly.
25. Unverifiable High Stakes Ultimatum
This one’s a big part of how you achieve the three Os, especially Outgrow and Outlast. Without this technique, no matter how many kids born within your group, many or most may leave once exposed to outside information (like the arguments you couldn’t deal with, which is why you resorted to this).
It helps big time if you can physically isolate your community in a remote compound/commune/facility, so youth never encounter anyone who disputes your belief, but in this modern connected world that’s quite the expensive and difficult proposition.
What you need is a contagious, self-reinforcing mind trap, of a kind which compels the afflicted to resist all attempts at removal. In this way, you need not supervise members to watch for signs of backsliding; they will proactively keep themselves fooled on your behalf, even attempt to convince others on their own time & dime, believing they’re doing something altruistic.
The basic anatomy of the Unverifiable High Stakes Ultimatum is right there in the name: High Stakes, offering an infinite reward for belief, threatening an infinite punishment for disbelief; the carrot and stick, or good cop/bad cop which incentivize belief and deter doubt.
The reward and punishment don’t exist, so they must be Unverifiable; Intentionally defined in such a way that no one can concretely disprove it. Ultimatum means forcing them to make a decision with incomplete information (a leap of faith), which appears to be an unavoidable organic circumstance rather than something you contrived. (Reward, threat, proof, all reside in a post-mortem realm. Out of your hands!)
If crafted correctly, this is a psychological black hole from which escape is all but impossible, once you cross the event horizon. Or one of those neon transparent yellow cylinder/funnel bee traps, easy to wander into by accident, with but a single narrow exit that’s considerably more difficult to find. The nagging “But what if it’s true??” splinter in their hindbrain will keep ‘em coming back.
”Easy in, hard out” means more people joining than leaving, such that your group’s numbers steadily swell one generation after the next. Ideally this results in a world where everybody, or at least a huge percentage of humanity, already agrees with you. Thus, you have avoided the need to persuade them by argument. Of course by this time you’re long dead, but there’s a downside to every approach.
Outro
That seems like most of ‘em, I may come back to this if there are some I forgot to include. Be sure to comment, probably something like “Dur hur thanks for explaining how Republicans/Democrats/Christians/Atheists argue, smug emoji”.
Armed with this knowledge and up to no good, you may now proceed to sow discord in every online space where arguments occur. Now, nothing constructive can ever come of reasoned dialectic, ever again. And remember, never admit you're mad! In fact, he's the mad one.
U mad😏