Facebook Conversation Trapped in Some Libertarian Logical Hellhole

Jan 30, 2019

Someone you barely know in real life has proclaimed victory on your Facebook wall. They’ve “recapitulated once again” that your “argument has been soundly defeated by logic” and that they--unlike you--“stand for the truth.”

This tedious conversation has now hit over 100 comments. Each time you think it’s done, your Facebook friend returns to argue the facts against your case and gain the last word. They’ve insisted that their “ratiocinations are going over your head” and that you are bound by “biased untenable feelings.”

“If you just go back to my original point,” repeated your Facebook friend, who you met once at a friend’s party and baked chocolate chip cookies together, “you'll see that I did hear you. That I acknowledged your tenets. And then I consistently and clearly refuted each and every point you made.”

Your original post was actually a poem. You wrote a sonnet on how problems are often caused not by what's being said, but how things are said, and how these bad feelings trickle out into a toxic society.

But they “resolutely defeated this pathetic argument” by identifying how your rationale lacks a consistent hypothesis. Then they gave you a “death blow” by enumerating the ways in which you are just another indoctrinated product of mainstream media. Then they forwarded you a link from The Gateway Pundit to prove you wrong.