Is there a word for when an argument is difficult to rebut, not because it is a good argument, but because it is so self-evidently retarded that it would just take far too much effort to break down all the ways in which it makes no sense?
I suppose the easiest term to use here would just be shithousery, as used in football -
disruptive or underhand tactics designed to secure an unfa, ir advantage for one's team.
It's a Russian doll of nesting fallacies. Category errors, false equivocation, begging the question, primed strawmans and ad hominems if you start unpacking them.
Ironically PhilosophyTube's video last year on Judith Butler's discussion of phantasms is a really good explanation of what's at play here (this definition of "phantasm" is informed by the likes of Lacan). You've got a subjectivity which informs how you understand yourself and the world around you. When you encounter things that contradict this way of understanding yourself and the world, this can cause anxiety because it challenges your fundamental understanding, which is really stressful to unpack. For example, if you believe "saying trans women aren't women is transphobic, and transphobes are evil" but then start finding yourself peaking, you might start completely disengaging with the peaking content because you're questioning if these things are actually "transphobic" or if holding these beliefs are "evil", which you understand to be an evil pattern of thought and also conflicts with your understanding of your own social identity of being an "ally" and fearful of social penalties for losing that identity. This is not necessarily fully conscious and has been termed "doxastic anxiety". This group identity has knock on impacts - someone you know peaking can threaten your belief, and therefore your understanding of the world;
Thomas Harper explains it well;
Once people have conceptualized person
S as being
A, and then person
S rejects
A, then those around them must go through the trouble of reconceptualizing that person. In order to simplify matters, it is not uncommon for those around person
S to conclude that person
S was never actually an
A in the first place. Not only does this make reconceptualizing person
S easier – you can make
retrodictions incorporating person
S‘s past actions that appeared as if they were genuinely
A into the schema of them having never been
A – but it also makes it easier for someone to maintain their own belief in
A. When
S goes from accepting
A to rejecting
A, this acts as a threat to the belief in
A for
R, the other adherents of
A. The motivated reasoning goes: if
S rejects
A, then there must be some compelling reason not to believe in
A; however,
R believe in
A,
which in-itself acts as a justificatory condition for believing in A, and so
S must not have ever believed in
A in the first place; therefore,
R is justified in continuing to believe in
A.
In other words, rather than accepting that JK Rowling had some valid points, people reacted negatively and recharacterised her as
always having been a fake ally evil witch. The link above also goes into doxastic conservatism, in other words "I believe in this, which is a justification for continuing to believe in it". But essentially, if someone handles this sort of anxiety badly, they'll look to keep themselves into a curated bubble (easier than ever thanks to social media).
Anyway, that only works when you're not forced to engage with things that are directly contradictory to your beliefs. Where things that contradict your subjectivity happen, you might look for a sort of ego defence. This is where the phantasm comes in. You're not able to handle that information, so instead you revert to an emotional based reasoning system. You say something that isn't true and that doesn't make sense, and you don't even believe it when you first say it, but it feels like it being true would validate how you're feeling, and therefore you come to believe it is true... even when it doesn't hold up to any logical scrutiny whatsoever. The fact it doesn't make sense empowers the belief, because thinking critically about it brings back that anxiety, and things that give you anxiety must be wrong... so therefore the belief must be correct. This can also allow you to start absorbing other irrational ideas that sort of relate to your belief, because that reinforces your initial belief (which feels good, so is true) and challenging things relating to your initial belief causes you anxiety (which feels bad, so is false).
The examples Ollie and Judith Butler give are to do with displaced anxiety about capitalism manifesting as believing conspiracy theories about 15 minute cities and gender critical ideology. But you can draw a parallel with something like trans ideology; "I am isolated and lonely and people on the internet are saying I'm an egg" -> "I'm an egg, I need to transition, that's why I'm isolated and lonely" -> "I've transitioned, but I still feel isolated and lonely because people don't view me as a real woman" -> "I am a real woman, people who disagree are TERFs who want to hurt me". A big part of the discourse around phantasms is "I feel" becomes "I am", so "I feel under attack when a person doesn't accept me as a 100% biological woman" becomes "I am under attack when a person doesn't accept me as a 100% biological woman". Assertions are also disguised demands -> "There is no such thing as biological sex" really means "I demand you pretend there is no such thing as biological sex".
This is why arguing with people like this becomes so infuriating. The viewpoint is not just irrational but anti-rational. They will get defensive and dismissive towards anyone trying to reason them out of their irrational bubble, and will happily spew contradictory nonsensical arguments that hold up to no logical scrutiny because they are relying on purely emotional reasoning (whatever I'm saying makes me feel good so is correct, whatever they're saying makes me feel bad so is incorrect).
" to whatever the hell this is in such a short amount of time. This sort of anti rational reasoning is the sort of thing that used to be the domain of religious fundamentalists. Not normal Christians mind you, more like weird Fred Phelps types.
