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What? No, this is base Bulverism. You are ruling out the only answer which matters.
Have you stopped beating your wife?
As you’ve framed it, the only reasons to take the third option are if you aren’t an abuser, but feel the need to pretend you are, or if you are an abuser, but realize you can’t say it out loud. Hence “dishonest coward.”
This is stupid. There is an obvious third reason: you aren’t an abuser, but it takes more verbiage to explain so, because the question is stacked against you. Both of the one-word answers are inadequate by design. You are forced to spend more time structuring your defense than the opponent had to spend making the attack.
Yes, this is a bad thing.
In the simple case, the accuser only gets a little mileage from an asymmetric question. Extending “no” to “no, because I never beat her at all” is relatively cheap. Anyone who cares can see the full version.
But we don’t live in the simple case. Setting aside intentional misrepresentation, a bad actor can get more advantage by extending the question. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” has an obvious gotcha. “Where were you on the night of September 13th, 1987?” is not immediately obvious, even if it eventually unfurls into the same accusation. Asymmetrical questions are the simplest building block of narrative control. Narrative control does not converge on the truth.
Okay, but I like it when my team controls the narrative!
Great. Unfortunately, so does everyone else. I think you should uphold norms which favor the truth rather than ones which flatter whomever has the initiative. Right now that involves some gender-critical congressmen. In two to four years, who can say?
For a different perspective, consider this.
You can also answer "I've never started", no one can actually force you to give a yes / no answer.
The reason progressives refuse to answer "what is a woman" isn't because it's some sort of trick question, it's because any possible answer is offensive to some part of their ideology. That's the only reason they settled on "anyone who identifies as a woman" even though it doesn't actually answer the question, and makes them look deranged - it beats the alternative of straying in to heresy.
Right.
Adding qualifiers makes your answer weaker. Doubly so if your every word is being mined for sound bites. The most charismatic and agile speakers can still manage it, making a “gotcha” look like a normal question. (I was reading some of the Lincoln-Douglas highlights, and they’re chock full of qualifiers and hypotheticals. It was a different time.) These clips are not particularly charismatic.
It's not about sounding weak or soundbites, it's not about looking good in clips, and it's not about charisma. This happens all the same in autistic wordcell forums, where people write page-long arguments, and getting clipped is simply not a relevant dynamic. We still either have claims that the question itself is somehow unfair, with no explanation what is unfair about it, or Celestial-body-NOS's heroic attempts to come up with something, and quickly running into one of the contradictions with an important part of the progressive ideology.
I can walk you through all the options and point out how they run afoul of progressivism. I can explain why "anyone who identifies as a woman" really is the only option for them.
I can understand that you want to be fair to all sides here, but ideologies do sometimes paint themselves into corners, and there's nothing wrong or tribal about that out. Do you think creationists or flat earthers are being unfairly gotcha'd, or is it that they just don't have good answers to many questions, and have to resort to mental gymnastics? I know, the question might seem provocative in itself, how can I compare reasonable people like liberals, progressives, and academics to religious and conspiracist weirdos. If this thought went through your head, consider that you're the tribalist one that wants your tribe to control the narrative. I'm just saying there are weirdos with goofy ideas on either side.
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"Force" is doing all the lifting, there. They can try so intensely hard to force you to give a yes or no answer that you have to either counter-bully or play slippery, and either way, you've lost just as hard. The only defense that works is to lean into the worst possible response and dare them to try and guilt-trip you over it, and that comes with its own set of issues.
No, normally they can't, it would make them look unhinged.
Here's a recent example of what you're talking about. The only reason it worked is because the target of the tactic is responsible for an unhinged statement she's not willing to defend, but can't back down from for political reasons. If she was actually explaining what the statement means, or distancing herself from it, the tactic would look deranged.
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Bulverism is when, rather than demonstrating that someone is wrong, you assume that they are and then explain how they came to be so silly. Asking them "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?" does not assume that they're mistaken about anything. Indeed, you are providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate that their model of how the world works is accurate.
I genuinely don't understand how you arrived at the conclusion that "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?" are loaded questions in the way "have you stopped beating your wife?" is.
The reason "have you stopped beating your wife?" is an unfair loaded question is because it assumes a premise which may be untrue of the person to whom it is put. What false premises are assumed by "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?"
You'll note that "what is a woman?" is not a question which calls for a one-word answer. "Who won the 2020 election?" does, but it is entirely possible to give a factually correct answer to this question which is one word long ("Biden"). I'm really not seeing the parallels.
I'm calling gender ideologues and 2020 election truthers stupid. Whose "team" do you think I'm on, exactly?
Asking gotcha questions is not bulverizing. Watching someone answer such a question, then theorizing on how they must be a turncoat, lunatic, or dishonest coward, though?
There is an excluded option, what I thought was the obvious one: they don’t want to play a rigged game. They recognize a loaded question, or outrage bait, and try not to walk into the minefield. Sometimes this works out. Sometimes it looks cringey and gives the baiters what they wanted. Regardless, it doesn’t require lunacy or cowardice or even cognitive dissonance.
Trying to rehabilitate “gotchas” as a totally legitimate strategy, one that only works on the deluded, is wishful thinking at best. One can score rhetorical points playing for any team.
As the prophet once said:
I’m not trying to accuse you of bad faith. I think you have a standard human blind spot for tribal affiliation, and right now, it’s telling you that this weapon only works on the outgroup. That’s wrong. It works on whomever you can put on the spot.
I'm pretty sure "refusing to charge into a minefield" does technically qualify as cowardice.
Look, I realize this metaphor is beyond strained, but that’s only true if they’re under orders. Clayton and Swinson walked into this minefield on their own initiative. They have no particular obligation to keep moving in a straight line.
It’d be different if they were, say, called as witnesses for a defense.
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If Swinson had responded to the question "what is a woman?" with "a woman is an adult female human", I nor any gender-critical person would consider her a turncoat. The gender ideologues in her camp, however, surely would have. Likewise with Clayton: I wouldn't consider him a turncoat for saying "Biden won the 2020 election", but Trump and hardcore MAGAs would have. Do you disagree with either claim?
If Swinson had responded "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", the gender ideologues would not consider her a lunatic (indeed, they would be cheering with delight). But gender-critical people (and, dare I say it, most normal non-extremely online people) would consider her a lunatic. Likewise with Clayton. Do you disagree with either claim?
These questions aren't Bulverism, and nor is my diagnosis of why they're effective. They are designed to expose either that someone has crazy opinions, or that they're fearful of alienating the people in their camp who have crazy opinions.
I've asked before and I'll ask again. What makes "what is a woman?" a loaded question? What controversial assumption is encoded into the question "what is a woman?" Likewise "who won the 2020 election?" What makes either of these questions "loaded"?
Firstly, I've already asked you who you think my "outgroup" is, and you refused to answer. Downthread, I argued that the number of Americans who are neither 2020 election truthers nor gender ideologues are probably a minority: a depressing state of affairs, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less true. I likewise argued that, while I'm confident I don't suffer from either of these blind spots, there may well be a blind spot I suffer from that could be exposed by a gotcha question. If and when it comes up, I promise to let all of you know about it. As a moderator, I thought you might be a bit more cautious about ascribing opinions to people that they've never expressed and don't endorse.
Yes. Is this a bad thing?
We might say that gotcha questions of this sort are effective on anyone who a) believes things the average person considers crazy; or b) doesn't believe crazy things, but can't be seen to publicly disagree with the people in their camp who do. Does that describe literally every person in existence? Maybe it does. That doesn't mean "gotcha" questions are a bad or underhanded tactic: it means that, like so many other rhetorical or argumentative strategies, they expose the fundamental irrationality of the human species.
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