Due to my particular brand of Autism, I will recall words and phrases like one might recall a musical jingle from a commercial. This results in me being very good at learning and retaining foreign language, but also in noticing upticks in regular English words and phrases as they go into and out of popularity.
Recently, I have started to see a lot of Leftists in places like Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and even Youtube comments using phrases like "you're not even making any sense," "what are you talking about," "you're just speaking gibberish," and so on while arguing with other people. The comments to which they are replying are never any kind of incomprehensible or nonsensical, and it seems like this is just an attempt by the Lefty in question to try to pretend that his opponent has no argument. It could be right in the beginning of the argument or a few posts in. Sprinkled in along side these recurring phrases are random insults and swears. If I didn't know any better, I'd think it was a Glowie doing their best to follow SOP to rile up the other posters, or an AI trained to write this way.
Have any of the rest of you encountered this technique in your travels with increasing frequency? It doesn't even have to be political in nature, that's just where I know I see it the most often. I'm so curious about it because the rise in frequency that I've seen it lately makes me feel like this is something that some popular internet celebrity started doing, and a bunch of the NPCs took it as a software update and are now using it everywhere the same way they use "touch grass" like it's an automatic 'I win' button. Your thoughts and comments, please.
We probably agree that there's quite a good chance that a person trotting out these kind of phrases in response to a cogent argument is just being dismissive or doesn't want to engage. It wouldn't surprise me if there's been an uptick in this kind of bad faith tactic since the left has recently become more insular and unwilling to even engage people or ideas that don't fit their preferred narrative.
That said, however, this kind of thing can happen even to intelligent people arguing in good faith especially if their when their world view is very different from the person they're talking to. Very different world views means different views on fundamental truths which they are going to hold as axiomatic. Unless the argument is rigorous (which, let's be real, it ain't gonna be in an internet forum) there's a good chance the each side won't properly communicate truths they hold as axiomatic. When the other side reads the argument it could look nonsensical to them because the premises do not follow from their own axiomatic truths. This sort of good faith misunderstanding could certainly be on the uptick as western society becomes more fractured regarding the truths it holds to be self evident..