Yeah, these kinds of sea lions.
I’ve got a couple of them dogging me with a lot of bad faith demands and questions (you know, of the “Just Asking Questions” type, or JAQing off) and they don’t seem to understand why I block and filter their ever-so-persistently-polite leading questions and insistent demands. Just in case they’re unable to comprehend the meaning of the comic, here’s a thorough explanation of why sealioning is bad, in clear simple words, with point-by-point descriptions of the problem. It’s very useful, I’m going to have to save it for the next time I’m tempted to do more than roll my eyes and hit delete.
I heard tell that when sea lions were removed from the Bonneville Dam to the southern OR Coast, they actually made it back to the dam before the people who drove them down made it back. They just wouldn’t stay away. Sadly, this did not end well for the sea lions.
There’s a few bad faith trolls over in the comments on Jim Hines’ post “In Which John C. Wright Completely Loses his Shit over Legend of Korra“.
Hines feeds those to the goblins once they’ve overstayed their welcome.
Still, I cannot help but feel that the comic does not quite do justice to what he’s referring to. And real, actual sea-lions are pretty cool pinnipeds. Maybe the artist could have used an animal with existing negative connotations of dishonesty, like “weasel”. Which would still be unfair to real-world mustelids. Oh, well.
Mick Nugent to the white courtesy phone, Mick Nugent.
Thing is, the idea is that the stated aim of the sealion(er) has no connotation of anything bad, just civil conversation, and it can seem to start that way. Only after a fairly long period of time is it apparent that the whole intent was dishonest.
If there’s one thing a weasel isn’t, it’s dishonest. I’ve seen one chase and catch a chipmunk. Neither I or the chipmunk was at any time or in any way misled about the weasel’s intent.
When I detect “sealion” questions (not hard, there are several scripts depending on the subject), I tend to not respond directly to the question, but rather to the attitude behind them. So at post three, fangs out to the underlying attitude.
Crittercam Reveals the Vile Secret Truth of Sea Lions
Thank you. This was the best explanation I’ve ever received about the practice of sealioning.
I prefer leopard seals. They either bite you, or feed you penguins. No mucking about.
My thoughts exactly.
Sounds a lot like the infamous Gish Gallop. Do something that costs you very little time. Lead your opponent to spend a lot of time refuting you. Repeat until opponent is exhausted.
Ever notice that Congress does that too? It’s not much work for a group in Congress to propose a bad law, and not much more work to pass it, as long as it’s not obviously terrible. It’s a whole lot of work for citizens to defeat it. So they keep doing it over and over until they manage to pass one. SOPA and its spawn come to mind.
State legislatures do this, too. Remember the Wendy Davis filibuster? She spoke for eleven hours and blocked abortion restrictions. So the bastards just brought it up again in the next session, and it passed.
Meanwhile, the executive branch continues to quietly move toward building a pipeline that most people don’t want and ratifying the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Because they can.
Aha! I remember being vaguely confused as to who that comic was supposed to be criticising, and the subsequent use of the word “sealioning”, I guess because I hadn’t really encountered it as a tactic separate from other kinds of obnoxiousness. That makes a lot of sense though.
Tualha: Ya, my first thought was “oh I see, it’s like TTIP/SOPA/PIPA/POOPASCOOPA but for internet debate…”
Before this Wondermark cartoon came about to describe this sort of JAQ’ing off behaviour so precisely, I think RationalWiki called one such method of bogging people down in obnoxious queries a Denial of productivity attack. Sealioning is a much more economical word to describe the obtuse mindset at work, if not for the technique itself.
Owlmirror
*slight derail*
Since when are phallic symbols considered to be signs of homosexuality, especially leasbianism.
Last I looked they were considered signs of male heterosexual supremacy…
But yeah, Nugent the Sealion. He’ll write 1 million words demanding that somebody apologizes for something it should be clear by now the person doesn’t consider requiring an apology
If the woman in the front seat was Cathy Brennan saying “I don’t mind most people, but TRANSSEXUALS? I could do without transsexuals”, is it sealioning if a transsexual person asks her to give her reasons and won’t be brushed off easily?
The way I read the comic is that whereas once you could express your prejudice about a minority without much chance of a member of that minority asking you to clarify your position, nowadays the chances are good that a member of that minority is going to show up and ask for your reasons, and continue to challenge you if you fail to provide any justification. I don’t see why the sea lion is being painted as the villain of the piece.
procrastinatorordinaire
The point, It’s over there
Well procrastinatorordinaire, if I accept that changing the subject of the statement does not change the meaning of the encounter then I still couldn’t condone such endless unwanted contacting.
Indeed this is precisely because we’d have to assume the meaning of the encounter isn’t changed. Once we assume that, we have to develop general rules that we would have to accept should someone act towards us in similar ways.
There are plenty of waaay more meaningful avenues someone can pursue –when upset by someone’s statements– other than pestering the person themselves after it has already been made clear they don’t want to engage.
When I first encountered it, I read it as a straw man villain: If someone says something bigoted in a public forum and the targeted minority asks for clarification of the remark in that same public forum, it’s exactly like obsessively invading their home to make them uncomfortable. This is because public forums belong to the privileged, and it would be so much more peaceful if those people didn’t invade such public places and stuck to their ghettos. It’s not like they have actual social needs to interact with people in places safe from bigotry, they only have this irrational need to rudely impose themselves on the privileged.
I think Bronze Dog has it about right, but so do the other commenters.
The confusing bit is that quick little morality plays like this comic usually have a protagonist and an antagonist. In this comic, the sea lion is clearly behaving badly, or at least it becomes clear by around the 4th-5th frame. The thing is, the humans may also be behaving quite badly.
If the comment about sea lions in the 1st frame was was a total drive-by, the commenter deserved to be called on it even if it interrupted their car ride. (Assuming the car is open to the street like this one, and presumably moving slowly, and that the objector walks along with them.) If however they elect to not engage the conversation, eventually the objector just has to write them off as jackasses and move on.
procrastinatorordinaire #14
I know. I had the same misconception about that particular parable. It’s why I could never understand what “sealioning” meant. I assumed that the sealion was a stand-in for all potential minorities – visible and invisible – and that the two people dissing him were the highest of the privileged in our society.
So I’m reading it, panel after panel, and trying to figure out why the comic is making the minority out to be a bad guy for trying to figure out why he can’t be treated like a human being.
It read, to me, as if some white supremacist christian was going on a straw-man persecution complex, “Wah! Why can’t I have my beliefs? Why are these minorities oppressing us so much with their questions? They are so annoying!”
Now, at least, I understand what parable the writer *meant* to convey.
Oh FFS, The Sealion is about the insistence on faux “politeness”, portraying ineself as victim of “rude” people when indeed the own behaviour is everything BUT polite because you’re actually harassing somebody.
That is NOT the same as demanding that bigotted statements not be called out. But just as bigots don’t have a right to your space, you don’t have a right to theirs.
Not thta the conversation was about the people in the car being the bigots in the first place…
@20, Giliell
Indeed, I also forgot about the fact that the sealion claims to be polite, but it isn’t at all. And then plays innocent when people are getting annoyed/”rude” when it’s already been said: “go away”.
My problem with the comic is that now I can read either meaning into it because I didn’t have author commentary. (Intention isn’t magic.) My first encounter was from a Steam friend sending me a link to the raw image asking me if I could sort out the meaning. Without additional context, I leaned towards the sea lion being a stand in for a racial, sexual, or gender identity because a sea lion can’t simply learn to not be a sea lion, just like humans have a hard time changing their race, sex, and sexual orientation.
Only because I was given additional context by this thread, do I notice we can replace “sea lion” with something like “MRAs” and interpret it the way the author intended, since there are lots of assholes who ask bad faith questions while cyberstalking and feigning politeness or rationality.
@19 – That’s what I thought too! Guy makes bigoted statement, guy gets called out on it, guy acts like a victim… Seemed pretty obvious to me that the sealion was the hero here, and the two obviously privileged folks blowing off his reasonable requests for clarification were the villains. How anyone arrived at the opposite interpretation is beyond me.
I’m wondering if those who mistake the Sealion for a member of an opressed group are largely overlapping with privileged people who have little first hand experience with real life “sealions”. It may be the perspective and experience that makes the sealion easily recognizable for those of us who regularly have to deal with them.
If the sealion had spent less time insisting on politeness,
there might be a case for it representing opressed minorities.
but…
I think it is the first sentence from the person in the car, that sets them up as also a jerk. (The sea lion is a jerk, even on the reading where he is “a member of an oppressed group”.)
“I don’t mind most marine mammals, but SEA LIONS? I could do without sea lions.”
Sounds a lot like “I don’t mind most black people, but n–? I could do without n–.” Which, in less polite versions of the second sentence, is something one hears.
Giliell, are you committed to the reading where the people aren’t just victims of an obnoxious intrusive stalker but where the first speaker was right to say what they said? If so, could you explain why? It seems fairly likely to me that we are supposed to see both parties as jerks. (Which doesn’t mean equating them.)
procrastinatorordinaire: Your angle doesn’t work. Assume that the sea lion actually was a persecuted minority (they aren’t supposed to be). That works maybe for the first three panels. It doesn’t work with the sea lion refusing to go away. The sea lion follows them a meal. The sea lion follows them into their house. The sea lion is trying to argue with them well into the night, remaining in their bedroom without permission. The sea lion is still there in the morning wanting to argue. The sea lion constantly follows them and constantly ignores all requests to just leave them alone.
It doesn’t matter what the sea lion is trying to argue about, or how politely: They do not respect boundaries. They never leave. They are obsessive and persistent, and consistently rely on faux politeness as a veil for what essentially is stalking and harassment.
The attempts to spin the sea lion as Teh Real Victim have been around since day one of “Sealioning” becoming a thing. It is unsuccessful.
dmclean:
Bullshit. Panel six makes it clear what the comic is all about. The first human being mean is not the issue. The second human, the one who said that they shouldn’t insult sea lions out loud, in fact claims that their point has been proven, implying that they have encountered this same behavior before. Emphasizing that the comic is about sea lion being intrusive and never fucking going away. At the end of the comic, the dislike of sea lions expressed in the first panel becomes justified. Oh sure, the humans might be jerks, but it isn’t clearly the case, and it also doesn’t seem to be of any particular concern in the comic as a whole.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #24:
Oddly, I read this thread and wondered if my failure to spot that the first balloon might be bigoted was due to my not being a member of an oppressed minority.
As anteprepro says, that reading fails further on, but I’m still kinda kicking myself for not making the obvious mistake, if that makes sense.
Good point about the comment from the second human in the last panel, anteprepro.
stuartsmith wrote:
I can understand why, but imagine the first pane said something like, “I don’t mind most gamers, but GamerGaters? I could do without them.” Also, keep in mind that a sea lion is a mascot animal of sorts for the KotakuInAction reddit, which is a gamergate hub.
The thing about this comic, it seems: You need to read it twice (at least) to actually get it. I know I didn’t understand it when I first read it. I think the “story” of it makes more sense in hindsight.
I think it could have benefited from:
1. A few more panels to make it even clearer that the sea lion’s behavior is harassment.
2. An initial comment “summoning” the sea lion that is not, itself, a blanket statement about how they hate sea lions. (What would be superb is instead someone talking about a specific sea lion behaving badly, and then a sea lion coming in to Logically And Politely bleat about Not All Sea Lions.)
But, the comic was just meant as a comic. It became a meme and a verb and a brief, humorous visualization of a specific type of harassment. But it wasn’t meant to be. It was just a comic. A comic that resonated with a lot of people and seemed to distill an issue incredibly well, sure. But from the author’s point of a view it was just another week of publishing observational and absurdist humor. So it will not be perfect.
ck:
I seem to recall that that was the original intent behind the comic (illustrate a type of ‘gater Twitter behavior), but I can’t find the cite for the life of me.
I suspect that that only became the case after sealioning became a thing.
See also: Late November, a month after the original comic, KotakuinAction donating money to the World Wildlife Fund for a sea lion, and also joking about naming the sea lion Ethics and it’s habitat Games Journalism. It looks like a case of willingly identifying with the insults as a type of meta-humor, like when atheists jokingly call themselves “heathens”.
When I read it in the “minorities are annoying” way, I imagined that it was being written by some privileged white dude who has never seen discrimination and believes we live in a “post racial society”.
So his girlfriend/wife says something about how she can’t stand, I dunno, certain kinds of black people who talk in certain slang or whatever, and he’s like “Oh, no, here come those Social Justice Warriors who think there’s still racism.”
What follows looked, to me, like the bullshit/strawman version of how minorities and SJWs act. You know how Fox News and their kin like to tell us that you can’t even say “Merry Christmas” any more without getting fired? That sort of thing. Do SJWs act like that? No. Do privileged white dudes on Fox News pretend we act like that? Yes.
What’s wrong with sea lions? :-(
petrander: You are doing it wrong. More pomposity and verbosity. Indignant and self-righteous tone. Leading questions only.
@ck, the Irate Lump #31
If the sea lion is a symbol for GamerGaters then it does indeed cast the whole vignette in a different light.
They’re sneaky little sods, attempting to wheedle their way into our felinophile affections via nomenclature. The shocking truth though is that they’re not real lions!
I had trouble at first with the comic because I prefer sea lions over humans. So I tend to root for the animal because they are much less annoying than people.
Daz:
My word, that is a most egregious case of Internet Slander. I request that you withdraw such an unsubstantiated accusation forthwith!
karmacat
Now I want to see the comic with the roles reversed. Humans incessantly bothering poor sea lions trying to get on with their days. Sadly, the term “humaning” would be even more confusing.
anteprepro
My proof is thus: If sea lions are descended from lions, why are there still lions?
When the setup fails, the joke fails.
If the cartoonist intended this as a dig at JAQ-offs, he failed (see 1st line, this comment; also comments # 2, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 29, 32, 34). (If Malki simply intended an exercise in absurdity, he did pretty good.)
Progressive resistance to “civil” assheads really should build its metaphors on a more apt foundation than this particular comic.
No, if the Sealion were the minority person, the comic would go like this: Leave first panel as it is. Second panel: Sealion says: “Fuck you, you’re destroying our habitats and you complain about us. In the next panel a human with a “I like Sealions” t-shirt shows up who now follows the Sealion and tells it how it was so horribly rude and how it’s hurting the cause of sealions everywhere and that they will no longer stand with sealions just because of this.
Ah, so that’s what the sea-lion comic was supposed to be about. The first time I saw it, it was an obvious example of casual racists getting called out on their bigotry and refusing to answer minority members actively trying to engage in debate. Minority opinion was shown to be taken as invasive and personal, irrespective of the good manners/ approach of the minority.
But it was about odd concern/evidence trolls? OK, I get the intention now, and the kind of obnoxious and bad-faith behaviour this is making fun of … but seriously? Bad analogy, or badly executed.
@anteprepro #27
I think the point people who misunderstood this was, that minorities on television, in newspapers, in politics, as public figures are often seen to be invading people’s private lives. As reference take any civil rights movement for the past few hundred years. The priviliged majority consider any change in public discourse as an invasion of their privacy, their space – because their space is everywhere.
Or else explain to me any actual way same-sex marriage is “destroying” marriage. How is feminism “emasculating” men? How is abortion is “ripping apart the basic fabric of society”. White middle-upper class twits find any mention of things they don’t like very invasive. (c.f. also PR brigade, self-censorship etc. etc. and I include myself among those twits, which is why I’m thankful there are plenty of people to explain these things to me.)
“No, if the Sealion were the minority person,”
The definite article in that part of your remarks is the issue. It’s a false dichotomy. The sea lion is a jerk. The people may or may not be jerks depending on what you assume about the context of their remarks. As Pierce said, better choice of examples might have avoided this and then there wouldn’t be confusion.
It’s entirely possible that the sea lion is both in the wrong and a minority person.
Daz @38 sayeth:
So you’re playing the “no true lions” card? The sealions are lyin’?
Pierce Butler
Humorous memes based on comics? SERIOUS BUSINESS. Needs moar meticulous craftmanship.
=8)-DX
You do realize that your interpretation requires an extra layer of metaphor to be at work there, right? I like your interpretation, I do. I like the point it makes. And I do think it is there. But I think it requires more stretching of the imagination to get to that interpretation and make it work, like you have, then it takes to get to the interpretation of the comic that is referred to with the “sealioning” term.
The knitpicky criticisms of the comic and the sealioning term are kind of reminding me of the semantic debates over “privilege”. Except stranger, because this time it is about a term that is essentially a joke (or a reference to a joke, or to the common understanding of what a specific joke meant, or so on so forth quibble quibble quibble).
Well I looked further for that interpretation because the first time I saw it I assumed it was “on our side”, and so it surely couldn’t be a lambast against political correctness?
Like others, I also throughly failed to get the apparent point of the cartoon (at least in part because I’d never seen the term “sealioning” before). Poopyhead’s reference to “Just Asking Questions”ing-off (JAQing-off) hinted I was missing something, and a bit of Generalissimo Google™ clarified the matter.
Speculating, would the correct answer to any question asked by a JAQer, er “sealion”, be beer?
“Would you mind showing me evidence of any negative thing…?”
Beer.
“I’m jusr curious if you have any sources…?”
Beer.
“You made a statement… Are you unable to defend…? …unwilling to have a discussion?”
Beer.
“I am polite… you are rude.”
Beer.
=8)=DX:
For some reason, I also made the same assumption. Comfortably. I think it is because blatantly conservative artists have certain….tells. More sloppy and direct, less stylized. Or maybe I am just prejudiced against conservative artists. Probably both.
I really wonder if this comic might be easier to understand if the first panel was just blacked out entirely.
Personally, I find this comic uncomfortable. Particularly given the protagonists – they’re coded white moneyed class. They are, when you get right down to it, comfortable.
It looks more like a strawmanning of political correctness or “SJWs” or whatever, rather than the intended targets.
I recognize what it is trying to say, but I think it is too easy to reach that other interpretation.
I think the insulting questions in panel 5 and the reference to politeness in panel 6 make the point clear, but I agree that the first panel is pretty misleading. The ‘I’m not a racist, but’ structure followed by the injunction by another white person to not say it ‘out loud’ frames the comic in a confusing manner.
brucegorton: Regarding “white moneyed class”, that is essentially the default in Wondermark. Initially I thought that would help clarify the issue, but knowing that actually just makes the interpretation of the comic more confusing: Sometimes it is the source of the comedy, sometimes it is ignored because otherwise the only joke they could ever make would be “Haha, the Victorian era is so silly”.
From Wondermark’s About page:
So yeah. It isn’t clear whether we or not their class comfort is supposed to be something we pay attention to in this particular strip or not, but it is basically the norm for the strip.
Maybe “hodor” instead of “beer”, blf? Otherwise you might run in to:
SL: “You made a statement… Are you unable to defend…? …unwilling to have a discussion?”
P: “Beer.”
SL; “Sure, I’d be happy to grab a beer and discuss this with you.”
Also: I dispute the title of this thread. “At last”? The “comprehensive reply” was written in November. Shenanigans, Myers!
dmcclean: I am not sure if Hodor would be better as the reply, or better as the translation of their “questions”.
You know what, let me answer my own question: Why not both?
SL: “Hodor Hodor Hodor?”
P: “Hodor”
SL: “Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor?”
And suddenly I feel like I am writing a script for the Pokemon anime.
@45
That’s pretty much how I read it, as mocking the fever dreams of conservatives about some dreaded liberal bogey man invading their cars on the radio, their homes on television etc. The people who got it right away I think all had some context we, or at least I, was missing. With added context it makes sense.
As to complaints that it isn’t immediately obvious, I don’t think that is necessarily a downside and it was just a comic that took off not some grander messaging attempt.
OT: Sea lions are among the cooler animals I have ever had the pleasure of interacting with. I’ve had the chance to dive off of a few sea lion pull outs and the young pretty much always swim out to investigate. They are playful, inquisitive, acrobatic, and suprisingly (to me the first time) sound exactly the same below water as above. Some of the best dives in my near 30 years of diving have been with sea lions.
I find the comic confusing. It would have probably been clearer had I know about the term sealioning before.
Anne, Lurking Feminist Harpy & Support Staff #47:
I’m saying they otter be more truthful, yes.
@Beatrice #60
I think that’s where the term sealioning came from. It’s a circular lionism.
Yes, Mick Nugent is an awful sea lion. He has this weird idea that it’s wrong for people to falsely and maliciously accuse him of defending and supporting rapists, and then sneering at him and mocking him when he objects. Obviously he’s the bad person here.
And if he would quit providing a haven for those who rape and support rapists, he wouldn’t be the subject of any criticism here, would he?
You got two adverbs twisted wrong-way around there. ITYM “accurately and forthrightly”.
@13, Giliell:
I think most of what Michael Nugent wants apologies for is the offence of not recognising just how important Michael Nugent is to skepticism.
It seems to me that a lot of the trouble some people are having with this strip come from trying to match it up with groups, as opposed to taking it as making fun of a kind of behavior that someone in any group can engage of. It’s not the cause that matters – as illustrated by the use of sea lions, who aren’t being attacked nor attacking in most public discourse – it’s the transgressive persistence, ironically contrasting with the insistence that the intruder is just pursuing civility. Anyone at all can do that, of any ethnicity or race, any gender, any orientation, any politics, you name it. Every cause gets some jerks, and some worse than jerks, and it’s a good thing to laugh at the combination of hubris and cluelessness that drives it.
And then, of course, good to do a little work to make sure we’re not being the sea lions this time around.
I suspect the problem is that the woman directly expresses a problem with sealions and then one shows up. That forces the ‘minority interpretation’ and makes us think we ought to have sympathy for the sealion.
If instead the woman had criticised crocheting or summat, then the Sealioning interpretation would have come easier.
I think.
Apparently I’m in the minority but I see the sealion not as a minority but as a self-important jerk who imposes themself others and won’t “go away” no matter how forcefully the request is made. The woman is quite reasonable in her dislike of sealions, the one who latches on to her is thoroughly obnoxious.
benwalsh:
Cue the world’s tiniest violin. Mick Nugent is a sea lion. That’s a minor offense. Mick Nugent sealions in order to continue providing a nice lil’ hub for the slymepit to make rape jokes and rape apologetics. That’s less minor. And assholes like you flail about on his behalf, whining about how poor, poor Mick Nugent was MALICIOUSLY ACCUSED of things. Oh heavens, good gracious, oh me oh my. How terribly impolite.
Exactly. This comic was funny until people had to turn it into confusing jargon.
The problem with the comic is that it equates “posting something on someone’s blog” with “invading someone’s home.” The two things are not really that similar — if you’re running a blog and allowing comments, then getting comments from people who disagree with you seems like one of the risks you run.
So someone says something stupid on the internet: “Well, after all, everyone knows that gay people are responsible for Ebola.” You read this stupid thing. You now have three options:
a) Launch an all-out flame. Just eviscerate the person. Get deleted. Waste ten minutes of your life.
b) Politely ask the person to list their sources. Worst case — you’ve wasted two minutes. Best case — stupid person discovers Google, does a bit of reading, realizes they are an idiot, stops saying stupid thing, and rightness triumphs. Continue as long as person continues to obliviously say stupid thing. Be a sea lion.
c) Ignore stupidity. Six months later, note that now twenty other blogs are repeating the same stupid thing.
Which of these options is Prof. Myers recommending?
Here at Pharyngula, the answer to your example is to ask the poster to provide a link to support their assertion (clarify their position). Flaming held off on until three posts by the person making the assertion.
Gilliel @13 called it. Nugent continues his unhinged vendetta.
@ Brucegee,
you’ve changed the terms of the debate in your comment from “posting something on someone’s blog” to “posting on the internet” generally. A blog-owner has a set of options that aren’t in your list.
Not, then, the kind of sealion that is simply an excited seal?
No, brucegee. It equates following around someone everywhere IRL to argue with them with following around someone everywhere on the internet to argue with them.
No, it isn’t a perfect comparison, because it is also supposed to humorous and not a philosophical treatise. Do the two really differ significantly enough to make the comic’s point completely invalid? Is there a reason why the former would be clearly considered harassment and yet the latter is not considered harassment?
Please, explain.
brucegee1962 @ 72
No, it isn’t. It’s clearly talking about situations where one person pursues another into spaces where they have no reasonable expectation of being welcome. You, on the other hand, are trying to draw that false equivalence in service of propping up a straw person.