The Bad-Faith Interrogator is a variant of the “just asking questions” technique often employed today by media personalities to make an assertion without appearing to make any assertion.
In the case of the Bad-Faith Interrogator, the purpose of the question is a little different. Rather than attempting to make a statement while appearing to be engaged in reasonable questioning, this breed of troll’s entire purpose is to make you waste time and energy explaining things that don’t require explanation or demanding impossibly oversimplified answers to complex issues.
These questions tend to be the type that make you facepalm and wonder “why would anyone even ask this question” or “why would they frame the conversation like this?” The sorts of things that leave you thinking “how am I supposed to answer this without communicating a four year education in the subject, plus a few survey courses in logic and critical thinking?”
You: “Working people deserve a living wage.”
BFI: “What exactly is a living wage, how much is that?”
You: “Enough to live on.”
BFI: “No, I am running a business [probably a lie] and I have a [insert some phrase denigrating the work or workers, e.g. “coffee server” or “dishwasher”], how much exactly am I supposed to pay them per hour?”
Clearly there’s no answer to this question without further information – a living wage in Plainwell, Michigan is going to be quite different from a living wage in Brooklyn, NY or San Jose, CA or even in Lansing or Detroit.
Sometimes these questions will target information so basic that the average person will have forgotten it entirely: “but how do you know the Earth isn’t flat?” The average person is likely not going to remember how this proof was historically developed. Indeed, the concept predates history entirely; the earliest documented mention of the theory references long-held belief documented by Greek historians in the fifth century BCE based on information exchanges with cultures on the Indian subcontinent, and the sources of their information are largely lost to history. Attempting to explain the evidence will likely leave out examples or perhaps spell a name wrong or misremember a date, or provide other minor errors or holes in the information. Then the troll can focus on that error and claim it as evidence you don’t know what you’re talking about, and therefore the world is flat or Barack Obama was born in Kenya or vaccines cause autism or what have you.
This is a critical aspect of the tactic: to goad you into saying anything that can be seized upon to discredit your position artificially – a spelling error, a bit of linguistic laziness, a euphemism or analogy that can be twisted out of shape, or a simple answer to a complex question that the troll can then build up into an argument – not a refutation, mind you, just quibbling over minor and often irrelevant details – discrediting the respondent.
BFI: How much exactly is a living wage?
You: Twenty dollars an hour.
BFI: That wouldn’t last five minutes in Berkeley, you clearly don’t understand regional variances in cost of living!
or
BFI: That’s ridiculous, here in Fyffe Alabama that’s enough to feed a family of six with money left over, why should I subsidize the luxury lifestyle of a coffee server? Obviously you’ve never run a business, I suppose you think the bus boy should make $40!
or
BFI: What about people who don’t live in the US? Dollars aren’t going to do poor people in the Democratic Republic of Congo any good, why do you hate poor people/emergent economy nations/Africa?
…and we’re off to the races. Now you’re on the defensive, your character is under attack, and you’ve been labeled as a racist or some other irrelevant and inaccurate ad hominem that further diverts attention and energy away from the core point, that being “working people deserve a living wage.”
Dealing With Them
Frankly the best way to handle this line of attack is to refuse to validate it at all by engaging. The troll will then accuse you of being unable to prove your point. At this point it’s entirely acceptable to say out loud, “you’re not asking a question in good faith or seeking discourse, you’re trying to bait me into a pointless argument and I choose not to participate.” If they persist, reach for the block/ban/ignore button and move on.