So let's look at these links. You say "another poster has said it's about harassment and bullying." What Arthwollipot is actually doing is saying that sealioning is a type of harassment and a form of bullying.
Art said 'online harassment and bullying,' which are behaviors otherwise known as
cyberstalking.
The reason I brought it up is because you yourself had just denied that 'sealioning' had anything to do with cyberstalking.
| | No one has said it's about excessive politeness or cyberstalking
OK this is also not true. Several people have said it involves politeness. Even one of the cited articles describes it thus "In this, the perpetrator endlessly nitpicks and relentlessly pursues the topic, but oh so very politely..."
Another poster has said it's about harassment and bullying, and that it entails following people around to multiple threads and platforms.
The fact that other posters have definitions that contradict yours is evidence of my claim that the definition is nebulous.
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Squares are rectangles but rectangles aren't all sqaures, and boh are quadrilaterals, sets and subsets. Does this sound familiar?
Yeah, but triangles are neither rectangles
nor squares, are they? That's because at least two of their attributes are contradictory.
The problem with your set theory argument is that some of these definitions that people are giving for 'sealioning' are
directly contradictory to the definitions being given by others. Hence, they cannot reasonably be assigned to the same set.
It's redolent of your earlier argument that "false politeness" is a subcategory of "politeness." That argument makes no sense either.
It's probably not a good idea to invoke set theory as the basis of your argument, when you don't really understand how it works.
Your second link goes to Arthwollipot again describing a type of harassment that would fall under sealioning. Once again, it's still got the bad faith elements, and in fact he's replying to you saying "[following people on the street] is depicted in the comic, and that allegation also been made earlier in this thread. At any rate, following somebody around in their daily activities doesn't really have any appropriate analog on the Internet.
Yes, following somebody around in their daily activities
most certainly does have an analog on the Internet.
We've already discussed this. Arthwollipot likened 'sealioning' to the kind of cyberstalking and cyberbullying experienced by many women on the Internet. That kind of activity includes online harassment, doxxing, mobbing, account hacking, and threats of violence, which do bear a certain resemblance to following somebody around and harassing them in their daily activities.
Arth is responding specifically to a claim you made (which you would later claim never to have made, btw) but notably is not claiming to give a complete definition of what sealioning is. Once again, nothing about the linked post is incongruous with other definitions of sealioning unless you assume that each time someone responds to you they're also giving a an exhaustive definition of the concept.
The problem is not that I'm expecting an exhaustive definition of 'sealioning.' The problem is that all the definitions have differed to the point of incongruity, and some are even directly contradictory. Hence, there seem to be no practical boundaries and that renders the word practically useless for describing any distinguishable behavior.
Judging by the discussion in this thread, it appears that the word can mean whatever kind of behavior that an accuser wants it to mean.
