Comic Strips

Your definition of sealioning, that it’s defined by intention, that it involves a mask, these are all non-falsifiable. You realize that right? They contain no mechanism for accepting new information from outside your ideology, and make your mind starve to death.

This overall approach to things — to operate on the basis that all is known and understood and that those who disagree or behave as if there might be incompleteness in the knowledge — is what the term “totalitarian” refers to.

A classic example of “totalitarian” thinking is if you solve a game like tic-tac-toe. Having a game 100% solved, ie having computed every move, and therefore having 100% certainty as to the optimal play strategy, is a situation where you’ve encapsulated the totality of the game in your mind.

The idea that the totality of existence, of real life situations, is already known and the optimal strategy already computed, is “totalitarian”.

A totalitarian dictatorship is one in which that totality of understanding, and the resulting certainty of optimal strategy, is used to justify stripping subjects of all freedom. Any deviation from the optimal is considered bad, so freedom is worthless.

And of course there are degrees of totalitarianism, expressed implicitly in aspects of culture.

Science, by its emphasis on putting empirical observation above theory in terms of trust, allows for external information to update itself. Science is not totalitarian in that sense.

The term “Sealioning”, by enabling people to decide that any interaction at any time possesses a particular intention (un-observable, non-falsifiable), or that a particular mask is being used (un-observable, non-falsifiable), that they can just ignore the interaction and cast aspersions on the person they’re interacting with.