[narrator]

The thing about Socratic debate is that to do it well, and actually produce NEW information that's not the two sides yelling stuff they already believe at each other, the two sides need to agree to not engage in any of the informal or logical fallacies. Not a lot of people are familiar with the informal fallacies. Since they are arguments that can be used to support any argument, when I'm debating something online and I'm in the mood for putting work into it, I will use fallacies used against me to prove the exact opposite of the argument the fallacy user is trying to make. Anybody who has some education in rhetoric can adopt this technique. It makes arguing on internet forums kind of fun because it at least allows for an opportunity to demonstrate the reasons behind rhetorical rules. This is what these free speech platforms are good for, because you can really get into it with people in a debate before it gets cut off for not being polite enough to popularly held fallacious ideas.

For example, I sometimes go on to right wing forum and argue that the Jews are unfairly targeted for criticism as a group. It's a challenge to bring people around, but for some reason I kind of enjoy it. It's like fight club for my brain.

I think the fallacious arguments are getting more automated lately. I was once on a thread where there was some sort of auto-insult bot that would just hurl insults. I would reply with the insult back with the terms switched around. The lazy shill, or the bot would reply back. This went back and forth for a while until I asked the other guy if he was a bot and then it stopped.