THE TRIUMPH OF FOG: HOW TO ARGUE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

The only real purpose of social media that I can discern after several decades of using it, is to argue with random people about random stuff. There, that's about the size of it.

Of course, some people would conclude from this that the whole thing is pointless and a complete waste of time, but really it isn't. Arguing about random shit with random people on the internet is the modern equivalent of the dojo of the samurai -- a noble and indeed holy online space in which the warriors of the one-liner, the swordsmen of the snark, and the ninja's of the neg can sharpen their wits and achieve intellectual ascendency.

To demonstrate I will give you a real life example. 

Meet Henry Hill, a twitter user of an oddly melted appearance, a fact I was careful not to reference in our gentlemanly interaction:

Disturbingly, Hill styles himself a "conservative," which in my experience often signifies that someone is the worst kind of degenerate known to man, beast, and small, defenceless child, but anyway let's give Mr Hill the transitory benefit of the doubt. 

His Twitter biography says that he is the Deputy Editor of ConHome, which I can only assume is a site dedicated to cheating people out of their houses through some borderline illegal remortgaging process.

But, leaving such financial shenanigans aside, Mr. Hill's interaction with the outside world today involved divulging his opinions on the "high visibility" yellow jackets commonly seen on police officers and various outdoor and emergency workers in the UK.

Indeed, Mr Hill seems to take umbrage with this use of brightly-coloured tabards, yearning for an earlier, more pristine age, in which policemen did not adorn themselves with dayglo yellow.

He accordingly tweeted: 

Seriously, ban police high-viz. Ban it. Our European friends manage somehow.

He also posted images like this of European police without hi-vis vests, little realising that they might be wearing bullet-proof vests instead:

While this hi-vis vest thing was clearly a hill that Mr Hill was ready to die on, I didn't have a dog in the fight. I couldn't care less about this supposedly "burning question" that is setting the internet aflame, but Hill seemed a suitably random person amd the subject of hi-vis police vests a suitably random topic to have an outline argument over.

Intuiting that for every opinion under the sun, some subtle counter-argument must exist, I replied with a statement which I was sure would provoke further response without seeming to provoke further response: 

Britain is a foggier and murkier land than sunny Europa. We probably need to put flashing lights on our bobbies so they don't bump into walls and random criminals.

This was designed to niggle my quarry enough so he wouldn't let it lie. He promptly took the bait and doubled down on his initial position with a reply and a nice photograph of Norwegian policewomen:

Yes, can't have the sartorial standards of that tropical paradise, Norway."

Of course, the unsubtle implication here was that Norway has sunny weather and no need for hi-vis vests, so Britain must have sunny weather and therefore no need for hi-vis vests. Crude and feeble!

I was not about to allow such sloppy argumentation to pass, and hit back with an image of my own and the following comment:

Exactly, the Nordic sun is shining, intensified by reflection off glaciers, snowy peaks, bits of ice, and superior dentistry. They probably need shades to avoid snow blindness.  Meanwhile an above average day back in the UK:

Mr Hill was now forced to resort to a heavily emotionalised appeal to tradition, a demonstration of Colonel Blimp doggedness, and a Churchillian invocation of "bumbling through despite the odds" all captured in a deceptively simple phrase and image: 

Somehow, we'll cope.

No doubt he typed this in the spirit of the French cavalry at the Battle of Agincourt boasting that the English arrows would provide them with cooling shade in which to enjoy the fight, but in reality he was switching to a game of draughts in the middle of a chess game.

I promptly exposed his comprised position and the hopelessness of his quest to 'queen' himself:

The temporary lifting of the fog reveals that they have arrested one of their own, after blindly knocking his helmet off. Meanwhile the criminal is only 2 feet away.

The last foamy blood of argument was now gurgling from his crushed and battered body. With his last gasp he tweeted: 

And yet, it worked

He was attempting to invoke some pristine past that merely exists in the minds of deluded simpletons, a belief that was no such thing as crime before the 1960s.

I could not leave it at that, as bursting that bubble would also add to the triumph I had already enjoyed over the obvious benefits of hi-vis vests in a low-vis climate like Britain's:

It didn't work, that's why we had to send our underclass to Australia so that police could actually see them.

There, I hope I have not taken up too much of your time with this piffle, but that, in a nutshell, is how to argue on social media.