"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.

"They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre

A channel called Innuendo Studios chronicles this tactic and many others in a series called The Alt-Right Playbook [1]. I found it enormously helpful to understand the mentality and tactics of a group that kind of doesn't make any sense.

[1] The Alt-Right Playbook: Control the Conversation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaPgDQkmqqM

Those are great points in the video - I've seen them employed by people who care more about winning than the truth irrespective of political affiliation.

You can't. People making absurdist statements like that and claiming them as "opinions" when someone rebuts them are the principle reason I stopped looking at social media sites (and I barely looked at it before then). If someone says, "The sun didn't rise today" and everyone else points out the sun in the sky, and their reply is "Well, that's, like, your opinion, man", it's safe to ignore them. Don't engage because they have tacitly admitted to being an unreasonable, delusional individual.

> it's safe to ignore them. Don't engage because they have tacitly admitted to being an unreasonable, delusional individual.

We saw last Wednesday that it's no longer safe to ignore them.

In my city every act of violence at BLM rallies was somehow blamed on white supremacist and Proud Boys by the local media and on social media.

We're fully post-fact now, and it's not just Republicans playing this game.

Exactly, and no Dem ever gets deplatformed for these incessant lies that lead to violence and death. Shows you it's all an excuse to purge Republicans (liars though they may be)

You are just lying. Guillani did not say "Democrats attacked the capital" he said, "Also, there's equal if not more responsibility on the fascists who now running the Democrat Party, who have imposed censorship on these people, who have been singling them out for unfair treatment since the IRS started going after conservative groups."

That is an opinion.

Ok, I did. Explain to me where it says anything about lying is an opinion: https://bit.ly/39nLiwz

The same way he talks to you... with facts and evidence.

Either he has it or he doesn't.

The problem is many people act like evidence doesn't exist - just like with voter fraud.

Adults can talk to each other and listen ideas and make up their own mind without Daddy Tech deciding for them what's right or wrong. It's called personal responsibility and it's theoretically the corner stone of western society.

When "bad" ideas are removed from the public eye... they grow underground. The way to fight them is to make them public where truth will prevail.

He has something more powerful than facts, lies.