What Is Sealioning?
28th February 2018
Sealioning is the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive cluelessness, that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand.
A Sealion is a person who, when confronted with a fact that they don’t care to acknowledge, say, the persistence of systemic racism in America, will ask endlessly for “proof” and insist that it is the other person’s job to stop everything they are doing and address the issue to their satisfaction.
Note that the Left is congenitally guilty of ‘sealioning’ while having created it as a stick to beat those who don’t bow to the Narrative. ‘Sealioning’, like ‘mansplaining’ and ‘price gouging’ (and ‘profiteering’ and ‘black market’) is one of those smear-words that statists make up so they can have a label they can use to survive episodes of cognitive dissonance.
There is, of course, no ‘systemic racism’ in America, except in the fantasies of those who are so obsessed with the race Narrative that they see it everywhere. It’s just another political religion, the axioms of which are unquestionable.
February 28th, 2018 at 11:36
I’m amazed to find that it now has a term. Somehow, I thought it was just a few idiots that interacted with me.
Example: One of those current anti-2A posts that lists a bunch of things the government supposedly did that made our lives safer. I pointed out that all of them were flawed and several were just completely wrong. That brought about the flurry of “prove it” sealions. I told them, “No. Just google the items and read what comes back. I’m not going to do your fact checking for you.” That brought out another order of magnitude of anger, along with more “prove-its”. Finally, someone jumped in to say that he had personally checked every fact and they were all 100% true. I called BS on that, and explained why the first item was wrong. (About the so-called “Mansfield bars”.) And I threw in, “Your google-fu is weak.” Instantly, I was “insulting” and a “name-caller” (huh?) and people “felt sorry for someone as angry (as me)”, and, predictably, I was told I should stop watching Fox News(which some spelled as Faux News).
I used to laugh at the notion that Leftism was a form of mental illness. I’ve converted to thinking that must be true.
February 28th, 2018 at 15:18
It’s not so much a mental illness as it is a religion. Arguing with leftists is very much like attempting to argue with Jehovah’s Witnesses or the more outré Pentacostal sects.