I submit that “the point is that the people complaining about the sea lions have an immature attitude towards social media, plus they see nothing wrong with disparaging groups of people in public and are mad when called on it, and generally they are massive hypocrites”. (I know it’s not what they intend to say, but it is the meaning I take from their speech.) That being the case, it makes me uneasy when I see someone I respect use the term from the comic unironically.
Yeah, honestly that’s my take from it as well. But I think it’s true that in certain settings you can use the “polite questions” approach as obstructionism, and it might work. For example, any kind of work meeting, an assembly, a council of any sort. “Asking polite questions” as a sort of DDoS attack on the bandwidth of any discussion is a possible dirty tactic that gives you plausible deniability. However knowing the context, the actual complaint here is probably: “I made a sweeping statement on social media about people, who should not be offended by because obviously I wasn’t talking about all of them, just the bad ones, they know who they are, and then those people kept nagging me on the internet which then compelled me to answer and read their answers”. To which the sane answer is “then don’t make stupid sweeping statements on social media about people, or if you do and then are nagged for it, shut down your goddamn phone”. So I think the concept itself of sealioning isn’t completely out there, but the specific meaning the strip was originated from is actually a pretty self-centred perspective.
I see it as a case of a potentially useful term that just happened to be used badly on its very first occurrence.
Yeah, honestly that’s my take from it as well. But I think it’s true that in certain settings you can use the “polite questions” approach as obstructionism, and it might work. For example, any kind of work meeting, an assembly, a council of any sort. “Asking polite questions” as a sort of DDoS attack on the bandwidth of any discussion is a possible dirty tactic that gives you plausible deniability. However knowing the context, the actual complaint here is probably: “I made a sweeping statement on social media about people, who should not be offended by because obviously I wasn’t talking about all of them, just the bad ones, they know who they are, and then those people kept nagging me on the internet which then compelled me to answer and read their answers”. To which the sane answer is “then don’t make stupid sweeping statements on social media about people, or if you do and then are nagged for it, shut down your goddamn phone”. So I think the concept itself of sealioning isn’t completely out there, but the specific meaning the strip was originated from is actually a pretty self-centred perspective.
I see it as a case of a potentially useful term that just happened to be used badly on its very first occurrence.