It's not that hard to dodge an argument. The trouble with avoiding a debate you know you'll likely lose is that you either have to acknowledge your ignorance about your position or, worse, its weakness.
But there is one way you can not only avoid having to acknowledge your bad positioning, but even strengthen it on a mental level, while pushing the idea that your position is far more important because of who you're arguing with.
All you have to do is accuse your opponent of having some sort of failing themselves. The accusation not only lets you shrug off debating them entirely, but it also pushes their ideas into "bad guy" territory, thus automatically making you and your argument "the good guy."
This is a pretty common tactic on the left. Social sins are handed out to the left's enemies like free samples at Costco.
One such insult that you've probably heard is "incel." You'll more often than not hear this one lobbed at men by leftists and feminists, particularly men who have something to say about modern culture.
At its base, "incel" means a man who is involuntarily celibate, and as a result, is angry at the world, especially women, and irrationally hates anything that has a woman attached to it. These are the ones accused of living in their mother's basement and lobbing insults, bad reviews, and misogynistic comments at anyone and anything standing too close to a vagina.
The thing is, a person doesn't have to be an incel to receive the accusation. In fact, most people who have the accusation thrust on them aren't incels at all. They're often married, have children, and are, for all intents and purposes, normal. They often don't even have opinions that could be considered extreme by any measure. They might not like something, like a movie, television show, or activist action, because it's just dumb, and they're calling something what it is.
Yours truly tends to get this insult a lot. As most of you know, I'm a culture critic and a YouTuber. A lot of what I talk about is culture-related topics, and at this point, it's pretty obvious that I'm not at all friendly with the left's "woke" injections of ideological nonsense into things meant to take us away and/or help us relax.
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Of course, the accusation is nonsense. I'm a married man with a three-year-old son, an active social life, and a healthy state of mind. My cultural takes come from a position of fair criticism. I'm a seasoned storywriter, and I've been a culture critic for well over a decade, and I'd even go so far as to say that my generational positioning as a Millennial is pretty advantageous in this particular era for pointing out what does and doesn't work in entertainment.
We grew up during the Disney Renaissance, had the benefit of our own programming and Gen X hand-me-down shows and movies, and were just out of our formative years during the birth of the internet. There's a reason most of the more popular culture critics are Millennials. We experienced the best of a lot of worlds, so it's very easy for us to point out and articulate the worst of it.
That's not to say other generations can't see the obvious facts in front of them, too. The people calling out woke nonsense aren't a solo act; it's an entire choir.
And the leftists and feminists know this. The number of people who don't like woke culture outnumbers them by a pretty solid amount, which is why they toss out accusations like "incel." They don't do it to make anyone else think your arguments are irrelevant. They do it because the word is their safety blanket. They snuggle up to it because they think this thin little word will protect them from outside opinion.
As a kid, I used to pull the blanket up to my neck every night because I was afraid vampires would come and bite it, suck out all my blood, and turn me into a monster. These feminist leftists are doing the same thing with the word "incel." It's not actually stopping the criticisms they don't like from being true, but they feel like it is, and that's all that matters.
But the issue is that hiding behind the word stops reality from sinking in. They're going to go on believing what they think is correct despite all pointing to the fact that they're not.
