Pancakes, waffles, and hopeless arguments
If you like pancakes, do you hate waffles? And is this even an argument worth having?
A much-memed tweet says that Twitter is
the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say “I like pancakes” and somebody will say “So you hate waffles?”
It's such a witty way of expressing a perennial problem that I feel rather churlish pointing out that this behaviour isn't actually confined to twitter at all. My mum regards all forms of social media with deep suspicion, but if the pancake/waffle tweet was an Olympic event, I'm confident she would be in medal contention.
I vividly remember how, while trying to find a summer job, I complained that commuting to the nearest town would add two hours to my workday and swallow an hour's wages, meaning I would effectively work ten hours and be paid for just seven. Her response: "Are you saying everyone who has a job is nothing but a wage slave?"
I was still young and naive enough to believe people were essentially operating on some form of reasoned logic, so I was baffled at this response. Wasn't it obvious that I was complaining about the difficulties of seeking work while living in a poorly connected village? How did you get from that to "wage slave"?
A few years later, older but not necessarily wiser, I complained about my frustration as a non driver when drivers took the lead on planning activities and didn't check that their chosen venue was accessible without a car. Her response that time was, "I don't know whether you're saying nobody should have a car or whether you're saying I should give you a car." Again, I thought I'd been pretty clear that I was venting about having my needs overlooked because they weren't the same as other people's.
I think it's significant that on both occasions, I was complaining with no expectation that she would do anything except acknowledge my frustration. She takes a problem that she can't swoop in and fix as a personal insult. How much easier for her to misinterpret my complaint as something ridiculous that she would be justified in dismissing out of hand.
I don't suppose everyone who tries this trick on Twitter has that specific motivation, but misinterpreting a tweet to make it easier to attack or dismiss is certainly a common tactic in bad-faith arguments. It is, after all, just a special case of a logical fallacy well known enough to have a traditional name: the strawman fallacy.
What the pancake/waffle strawman is intended to achieve varies depending who's deploying it. Some people want to win the argument, or make it appear to onlookers that they have. For others, just having the argument is enough; they can mock anyone who tries to attempt a serious rebuttal, or just sit back in the knowledge they've tricked an opponent into wasting time on their nonsense.
A third group is those who don't see it as a strawman. After all, if someone likes pancakes, it's not unreasonable to imagine they hate running out of pancake mix. And the preachy vegan who concludes that liking pancakes implies being happy with the exploitation of chickens may be unnecessarily aggressive, but they aren't committing that particular fallacy.
In a sense, pancakes/waffles has come full circle, with some people now using an accusation to shoot down reasonable extrapolations. Loving Harry Potter may not inherently imply hating trans people, but it does imply not considering the author's widely expressed views to be a deal breaker. For many trans people, that level of indifference is essentially indistinguishable from hatred.
Inaccurately deploying or calling out pancakes/waffles is the sign of a bad faith argument, but doing it in all sincerity isn't a great sign either. You might be slipping into an adversarial mindset, where scoring rhetorical points is more important than understanding the other person's point of view. Sometimes a dangerous attitude needs to be called out, but often it's better to walk away from an argument that is going nowhere.
The block and mute buttons make this a lot easier on twitter than it was when I was being aggressively misunderstood by my mum. I wore myself out trying to understand her point of view for years, and only stopped when a completely different act of bad faith convinced me to use the offline equivalent of the mute button by drastically reducing the amount of time I spent with her.
I still believe, deep down, in reasoned argument. I sometimes wonder if my tendency to pursue twitter arguments long past the point where I should cut my losses comes from a desire to keep fighting the battle with my mum because just maybe this time I can convince her. Recognising a losing argument isn't always the same as walking away from it.