Today I want to talk about some ridiculous online drama involving a webcomic.1 The characters involved are deeply silly and terminally online. And while none of it matters in the slightest, it’s been very funny to watch.
But I also want to talk about the deeper motivations of the people involved. I tend to view online discourse as a form of art, not all that dissimilar from theater. It’s a performance we put on for the viewing pleasure of others. And like theater, it can be analyzed through a critical lens. We can talk about the patterns, themes, motifs and motivations behind the performances. And by doing that, we can learn about why political discourse online is so poisonous.
Wordy Webcomics
The drama kicks off with a tweet from Basil, a political poster on Twitter who is somewhere between liberal and leftist. Basil takes issue with a comic from Haus of Decline, a leftist webcomic artist:
It’s a good point. By itself, this probably wouldn’t have caused too much drama. It’s an echo of the common Leftist Memes Mucho Texto joke. But then in a follow-up tweet, Basil compared Haus unfavorably to the white nationalist comic StoneToss.
Haus of Decline did not enjoy being compared unfavorably to a Nazi! They responded in a calm, rational manner:
Things escalated from there.
At this point I’m going to stop screen-capping every individual screaming match, but the argument quickly became an entire Discourse with camps of people forming around Haus and Basil. Haus has a very large following, so folks jumped in to accuse Basil of being a Nazi sympathizer for saying the StoneToss comic was better structured than the Haus comic. Basil was also accused of being a fascist and an ethno-nationalist, somehow. Much of this animosity stems from Basil’s infamous firebombing a WalMart tweet, which the online left has never recovered from.
Others accused Haus of Decline of being mentally ill, and even worse, of making terrible comics. Lots of people were unapologetically called slurs, except when Haus misgendered Basil and then apologized because apparently accidental misgendering is worse than calling someone a Nazi fascist racist.2
Other prominent personalities soon got caught in the wake of the discourse. Armand Domalewski pointed out that the StoneToss comic is technically accurate and you don’t need ID to vote in many places, was called a Nazi defender. Lots of folks made comics mocking the original situation:
And so on. Things carried on, enemies were made, and everyone probably should have logged off at some point. The discourse is fading as this post goes out - we’ve reached the ‘Did we really just have a fight about words in comics?’ phase of the discourse. Yes. Yes we did.
Arguments are Soldiers
So! A few thoughts:
I try not to be too coy, so I’ll just directly say that I think Basil mostly behaved like a sane, reasonable adult and Haus was deranged about the whole incident. Let’s also establish that taste in art is personal, and there is no ‘universally correct’ answer as to what makes a joke effective, and despite all of that Basil is objectively3 correct. The joke is cleaner and funnier without so much text.
Adding ‘THIS FEELS WRONG BUT THE MONEY KINDA HELPS’ at the end is the epitome of violating the Show Don’t Tell rule of narrative. It’s the exact joke of leftists over explaining everything. You can even fit this joke into pre-existing meme formats without needing to alter it at all:
But beyond the artistic criticism, we should think about why this exploded into a whole massive discourse in the first place. Without Haus’s absurd overreactions, there wouldn’t have been a discourse. So why did Haus blow up so hard?
There are two ways to argue on the internet. One way is to argue at an object level - is this thing true or not? What are the facts? What is the clearest way to interpret this data? You’re trying to reason and debate your way to some version of what the ground-level truth is. This way of arguing is productive, beneficial, and rare.
The more common way to argue is to treat the discussion as a war. The person arguing against you is an enemy combatant, and arguments are soldiers. The purpose of an argument in this paradigm is not to discover the truth or reach some mutual level of understanding. The purpose of an argument is to crush the enemy.
Let’s take a completely uncontroversial topic like gun control. Suppose a politician has proposed a new, strict gun control law and people are arguing about it. Let’s say it might have the following effects:
It would lower the rate of gun crime overall.
It would give people fewer self defense options if they can’t carry a gun.
Some people living in crime-ridden areas would feel safer with fewer guns around.
It would make it harder for responsible gun owners to practice hobbies that they legitimately enjoy.
Each of these statements is a baseline-level fact about the world. You can argue whether those facts are correct or not. You can argue about their relative importance, and whether the policy would be net-positive or net-negative considering all these factors. That would be the productive kind of arguing.
What happens in practice is different. One person posts that we need gun control to lower the rate of gun crime overall. Another person says that’s fake, gun control would make crime worse, and you’re a gay commie. The next person says hey buddy, you only like guns because you have a fetish for killing minorities and licking the police’s boots. If someone comes in with a question about ‘How would this apply to farmers, because sometimes I need a gun as a tool’ they are relentlessly mocked and abused.
The key feature of what happens in practice is that you can never give an inch. Nobody says “Well it would place a real burden on responsible gun owners and make their lives a little bit worse, but I still think the policy would be good overall for the safety benefits”. Instead, they deny the burden on responsible gun owners exists. They mock anyone with concerns. You cannot allow that someone else’s argument might be reasonable, because they are the enemy. If you admit they have a point - even a limited point - you are providing aid to the enemy in a time of war. Arguments are soldiers, and what kind of monster would stab their own soldier in the back?
So you deny that tradeoffs exist. You mock the other side, you never acknowledge they have even a tiny bit of a point to make. All their concerns are fake, all their motivations are evil, all their arguments are stupid. Every argument we make, no matter how hare-brained, must be defended to the death. Our team is the good guys and their team is the bad guys. You don’t want to agree with the bad guys, do you? Above all, do not cede any rhetorical ground. Do not give aid to the enemy.
If you think this is an exaggeration, I didn’t choose gun control by accident. The famous 30-50 feral hogs incident, which is now a piece of internet history, started as this exact same scenario. A rural guy asked how an assault weapon ban would impact people who need to chase off invasive hogs and was flamed and mocked by the entire internet for weeks. It was only later, with the passage of time, that we realized he was completely right4 and feral hogs are actually a massive problem.
Haus of Declining Mental Health
Once you think like this, Haus of Decline’s actions suddenly become a lot more legible. Of course they were furious! Basil said that the Nazi webcomic guy is good at formatting his comics. They said the Nazi webcomic had a better format than the leftist webcomic, and that's the same as giving ground to the enemy. Haus operates from the total war paradigm of online arguments, and so the only possible reason someone would ever admit that a Nazi has a point is if they too are a secret Nazi sympathizer.
Here at Infinite Scroll, we take the hard stance that Nazis are bad. Not a fan of those guys at all. But here’s the thing: hate racists all you want, but if a racist says that 2+2=4, that doesn’t suddenly make it equal 5. You can say the Nazi formats his webcomics well without believing in Nazism. In doing so, you’re operating under the first style of rational argument. But the people who treat debates as wars and arguments as soldiers think you’re just stabbing your own side in the back. You’re potentially even worse than an enemy - you’re a saboteur, a traitor.
This is perhaps clearest in the exchange below. It’s a wall of text, but it’s incredibly revealing:
This is an amazing tweet. Stripped of the fancy language it says “I was factually incorrect, but since that fact benefits my enemy you were wrong to point it out”. Bureaucratic procedural inaccuracy is a hell of a way to say “thing I completely made up”. Haus is explicitly promoting the debate-as-war paradigm. You can’t point out factual inaccuracies on your own side, because that just cedes ground to the Nazis! Who cares whether it’s true that you don’t have to show ID to vote! The only correct action is to yell at the Nazi, no matter what!5
This is wrong. It’s wrong on a factual level - Nazis sometimes do format their webcomics very effectively. We can tell they do because people from all over the political spectrum use StoneToss comics as meme formats. It’s also wrong on a strategic level. If neo-Nazi propaganda is working, it seems like we should talk about it. We should care about figuring out why, and effectively countering it. Putting your head in the sand and pretending it isn’t happening is no way to win.
The last thing I want to say about this is a bit of a downer. Haus eventually cooled off and posted some sad personal updates about how they’re facing eviction, can’t get their hormones, have been sick from stress, and have declining mental health. They implicitly blamed much of their outburst on those facts. It’s impossible to know whether that’s a fabricated sob story or a genuine post, but I’m inclined to take it seriously. It’s not fun to think about, but behind a lot of the insane discourse we see online is genuine mental illness - people who are not healthy and who are taking it out on the world.
And contra Haus, this is yet another reason to not treat discourse as a form of total war. Treating every discussion as a fight to be won at all costs removes the ability to understand someone else, to empathize with them. It’s extremely difficult to keep this in mind when there’s a dunk to be had, a funny post to add on to the dogpile of whatever we’re talking about. It’s much more satisfying to yell at people you dislike, but sticking to the ground-level facts tends to help you avoid dogpiling. Sometimes people have different points of view. Sometimes they make mistakes. And sometimes they’re struggling and just need a little bit of grace.
Delayed the usual Weekly Scroll post this week for this one - it’ll come on Tuesday.
I’m sorry, but “He is a fascist racist Nazi apologist dipshit who I personally despise, and will spend the next four hours ranting against”. “I don’t use he/him”. “Oh sorry my bad, that was uncool, I meant the rest though” is one of the funniest exchanges of all time.
Subjectively
Seriously, click that link and be astounded
As a sidenote, where I live in New York I also don’t have to show ID to vote, although you do have to show it when you register. And I’ve always found that a bit weird. There are arguments about people who don’t have IDs and how they might be disenfranchised - but surely this is an argument to make it easier to get an ID rather than an argument against IDs for voting?
Great post, thank you! Re “arguments as soldiers,” are you familiar with Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset”? She opens with a similar metaphor and argues for using your thoughts as scouts, not soldiers (hence the title).
This is the first thing I've read from you, and I thought it was absolutely fantastic. I'm looking forward to looking into some of your previous writings.