I read their questions as bad faith. But also, I am not here to research your bad takes. I will happily research my own bad takes but the onus is not on me to go prove or disprove every bad take someone makes on the Internet.
Is it possible that aliens came down from earth to steal pineapples? Does anyone have data to prove my claim?
It's patently absurd for me to expect someone responding to this to actually go make my argument for me.
> the onus is not on me to go prove or disprove every bad take someone makes on the Internet
then just ignore their comment, nobody forced you to engage or reply, and not every comment is written specifically for xracy.
you could also reflect the fact that you responded to a bad take (your opinion) with bad faith and arguably made the situation worse by adding nothing of value, or no value, and instead negative value :)
I see this as a dog-whistle in its most benign form. Which is why hiding behind the 'just asking questions' defense feels like expansion of the 'bad faith'.
Additionally, I don't think it's 'bad faith' to call what they're proposing like the basis for the movie Idiocracy.
The problem is that like, every version of this ends up being racist somewhere down the line. But because it's a dog-whistle my options are to engage with it, and have them hide, or to call it out for what it is, and attempt to have them explain their take and clarify their bad position to the point of not hiding behind the 'just asking questions' defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence <- Someone called out this link in response to my comment. All of the old versions of this use IQ, which was primarily developed to distinguish between the intelligence of "white people" and "other people" these days we couch it in 'class' basing the assumption that 'poor' = 'stupid', and 'rich' = 'smart'. But this also tends to be a proxy for race in a lot of meaningful ways (so-called 'model minorities' being the exception that makes the rule).
Now, I can call all of that out, and admittedly I have here. But they're not going to stake out their position if I do. They're going to run and hide because I've said the scary things that let them know they're in the wrong and that they should pretend like they weren't dog-whistling.
Admittedly over topics that aren't dog-whistles I appreciate the appeal to: https://xkcd.com/386/ But this reads like a dog-whistle to me.
Is it possible that aliens came down from earth to steal pineapples? Does anyone have data to prove my claim?
It's patently absurd for me to expect someone responding to this to actually go make my argument for me.