Man Up Your Internet Arguments

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Never:

Use emoticons

Girls and preteens use emoticons. Are you a girl and/or preteen? No? Then don’t end a sentence with a fucking smiley face.

Say "I was just kidding"

No, you weren’t. You were serious throughout the entirety of your argument, right up until the moment you realized you had lost. If you’re going to concede an argument, do so like a goddamned man – don’t pussyfoot your way out by pretending that the whole thing was just one, big, lighthearted debate, because those sorts of debates don’t fucking exist on the Internet.

Tell someone to "calm down"

Like “just kidding,” this is a passive-aggressive way of accepting defeat. If a person gets incredibly angry and posts a vitriol-and-fact-filled comment essentially destroying everything you’ve ever said, the immediate instinct will be to attack them on an emotional level; you got too angry over an Internet argument, ergo you have anger problems and no life, ergo I am a better person despite the fact that you roundly trounced me in this virtual battle of wits. If he gets angry and you’ve got nothing to say in rebuttal, then simply don’t – his comment will be the last in your Inter-argument, and its unparalleled rage will essentially make its poster seem like a complete lunatic, and you the wiser soul who decided an argument with him was not worth discussing. The dude will seem like a pathetic, lowly creature who shouts at the darkness, begging for an excuse to be argued with, if only to attain some modicum of human interaction. You still haven’t won the argument, per se, but you’ve made the other guy look pretty damned bad through your silence.

Use the “kid in his mom’s basement” insult

“Yeah, yeah, yeah – argue all you want, you’re probably some 25 year old who lives in your parents’ basemen, you pathetic little turd.”

People have been using this insult since the invention of the Internet, and it’s never been even remotely accurate or effective – especially not since everyone and their mother now uses the Internet on a daily basis. Wanting to argue something emotionally and to its proper conclusion on the Internet may mean you’re obsessive, petty, or overdramatic, but it doesn’t necessitate that you’re also single and living with your parents.

I don’t point out this particular insult because it hits close to home or anything, but because it’s really just not that insulting; more often than not, it isn’t true, and even if it was, you haven’t really said anything specific about your enemy’s state of mind or ability to defend a position.

Always:

Use profanity and evidence in conjunction

David Keuck once said, “Profanity is the crutch of the conversational cripple.”

I say, fuck David Keuck. A Google search of his name results in nothing more than the exact quote I’ve reproduced above showing up in multiple quotation databases. This means that throughout his entire life, David Keuck did nothing even remotely interesting or relevant, other than saying that people who curse are silly.  The guy doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, and Googling your own name will probably come up with way more hits than Googling his does. Fuck him.

See what I did there? I used profanity to insult and add irritated emphasis, and then I used factual evidence mixed with unbridled ranting to construct an argument. My system of measuring worth is absolutely absurd, and the syntax is abysmal, but who cares? It sounds angry, but reads factually enough that it’d be hard to argue against. That’s the trick – convince the person you’re arguing against that you’re a stupid, gibbering idiot who curses like a sailor in lieu of actual evidence, then fucking bitchslap your opponent with facts and figures and logic and laugh to yourself as the flabbergasted bastard tries to think his way around your argument style.

Make up your own forms of profanity

If nothing else, it’s goddamned fun, and can send your opponent scurrying to UrbanDictionary.com to decipher the completely fabricated insult you just hurled at him. Examples:

-Prunk

-Kiftweed

-Fulklick

-Bundt

-Tampon-munching, incestuous fuck-knob with pedophilic and shit-fetishistic tendencies

Be sarcastic off your ass

A lot of people say text can’t convey sarcasm properly, and those people are just so goddamn smart. They’re just geniuses, they are.

Using copious amounts of sarcasm is win-win. If the person you’re arguing against gets the sarcasm, they’ll be extremely angry at your condescending attitude and they’re likely to get so flustered that they either lose their shit completely, thus making an ass out of themselves, or they’ll smolder with quiet hate and unintentionally slip up as your argument continues. If they don’t catch your sarcasm, then you get to mock their inability to think in subtle terms: “You couldn’t detect sarcasm? Really? Do you want me to put any sarcastic comments in capital fucking letters next time, so your underdeveloped brain can fully comprehend the nuance and subtlety in sarcasm? YOU KNOW WHAT -- I SYMPATHIZE WITH YOU. IT IS HARD TO DETECT SARCASM THROUGH THE INTERNET."

Hide links to disgustingly pornographic shock pictures within the punctuation of your sentences

Nothing adds a little bit of surprise to the conversation like smuggling a link to goatse.cx within the period of your final sentence. Placing grossout shit like Goatse or Tubgirl within a post may very well give your opponent the opportunity to call you a disgusting, immature asshole, but his ability or inability to find your hidden shock links will tell you a great deal about where you stand in the argument. If he doesn’t find the links, then he’s not reading your posts very carefully; you’re not quite winning yet. If he does find the link, and chastises you for putting it in your post in the first place, then you know he’s been scanning your paragraphs multiple times, searching desperately for contradictions or logical fallacies. If he’s so dedicated to finding a way to defeat you that he looks incredibly carefully at your post and  actually finds your punctuation grossouts and then complains about them, you’re most assuredly winning the argument.

Use an IP masker, track the IP address of the person you’re arguing with and send him threatening phone calls from a pay phone three miles away from your home*

They can’t trace it, and if you make your call threatening and/or sexual enough, you might scare him out of the argument entirely. Some may say that tricking your intellectual opponent into not posting because he thinks you’ll come to his house and anally rape him to death with a knife doesn’t mean you’ve actually won the argument. I do not agree with this philosophy.

*Note: don’t do this.