For a first post, I thought it was pretty nice.
I mean you essentially took the words out of my mouth of what I was always thinking of the idiocy of hiding behind satire/sarcasm to shield one's self from criticism. Also yer critique on Poe's law seems to be spot on and pretty logical as well. I mean I can't find any serious faults, but I do take fault with the implications of your NOTE section.
[B}efore leftists start getting annoyed at me about advocating debate against holders of extreme, right-wing positions I'd like to say I'm only saying that one should do this once the idea has already been introduced.
Now while I can see that debate is a powerful tool, there's the problem of spotlighting ideas/people and giving them a shred of credibility if one were to discuss them. Not only that, if one were to accept the debate online or in real life, the winner of the debate always revolves on the speech and rhetoric component and very little of the power of the idea. Ever heard of Aristotle's delivery? An idea can be very great but the presentation of such can be bad enough that it could lead to the audience hating the idea. Not only that, if yer opponent is a trickster, they can win the debate even when the entire set of arguments are formally/informally fallacious and bears no substance.
But let's assume for a second that an opponent won't be a trickster and will say things in good faith, now we still have the problem if the opponent knows their substance or not. Because if an opponent wants to make arguments A because they support B but don't know what A is, then we got a problem. This leads to arguments going in circles, the opponent going ad nauseam on the same topic because they generally don't know the topic at hand and/or them providing misinformation on the topic. In a civil debate, this would be frowned upon and the person kicked out from the establishment; but most debates carried out today are infested with these people debating those who know their content (or not) and the victory status sometimes doesn't end up in the ends of the learned.
But let's assume that our opponent is both learned and not a trickster, well this runs into the problem of debates lacking mods or mods being biased. The former is scary since one topic can be discussed for longer or shorter than the topic deserves, and could give the person who is in the wrong a victory in that topic. Nonetheless, unmoderated debates run into the risk of both sides just screaming their heads off and nobody to pose questions that matters in debates. The latter is scarier due the fact that a mod can just give softballs for their side and hardballs for the enemy side. Nonetheless, the mod could purposefully derail entire conversations if the one side knows of their trickery, which we still assume that the opponent still picked them in good faith but didn't knew of their nasty side, and tries to have a legitimate conversation. These three are the major concerns that will be hard to deal with our current climate.
Yet let's assume that all three are non-issues. We still run into the original issue of spotlighting bad ideas and giving ideas/people the impression that these ideas/people have a shred of credibility in their bones. It matters not how many times its been presented, the fact remains that we acknowledged their position to have enough substance to be worth debating about. While liberalism teaches us that the best ideas eventually win out, history proves the opposite and that debates only work in academic spheres, which sometimes that ain't necessarily true!
Nonetheless, if yer side isn't knowledgeable in one aspect or can't counter a point, it gives an easy victory to the opposing side and makes yer side ridiculous that they couldn't even counter it. It gives the opposing side a chance to appeal to a portion of yer side's crowd, whom might have equal or worse education on the matter to the debaters, to show the (false) cracks in yer side and why they should ditch their current position.
So, how do we address their views without debating them? We can provide many things, but I will provide three major and sincere ways: responses, full-blown critiques and analyses of their work to point out the flaws and incorrect stances on their side. These avoid not only the three main problems of contemporary debates but also the problem of spotlighting and giving credibility to ideas/people implicitly. Since responses, critiques and (most) analyses are in a non-debate format that don't implicitly honor the other side and could suggest that they aren't credible enough to have a serious face to face debate. Essentially we don't dignify the other side but notice them enough to stomp out since they have something that is wrong with it.
RE: Poe's Law: Sarcasm and Satire Online