Internet arguments are the worst.

You're never going to win an internet argument, because there is probably a dense layer of caked shit that needs to be scraped off your opponents brain (or maybe it's you that has the caked shit, and years of self-congratulatory masturbation between people you already agree with have left you unable to process an idea contrary to your own). Oftentimes these arguments go nowhere, because people are just taking turns regurgitating gut feelings with no interest in learning something new. You effectively get trapped in a hole of stupid. Perhaps though, if we observe and follow a few rules, and avoid a few common pitfalls, we can have a productive session where both sides come out a little better than they were.

Know your medium

Where are you, exactly? A forum? A chatroom? Where you decided to take a big old dump of drivel is important, because it determines how well people can construct arguments. A long form forum-style debate can get deep from solid reasoned arguments dismantling a position to completely shutting down a total moron with a wall of citations. A chatroom is often filled with immediate and gut arguments, and if you want to slap someone down you have to have full command of your wits and memory. The worst is a face to face debate, where you are restricted even more heavily by demands for a shorter reply and you won't be able to look anything up at all. You'll also want to understand your likely opponents and your allies; is this an area where people are likely to gang up and laugh at you, or a place where you are ganging up on someone else? If you want to go into the lion's den to take down a bunch of big cats, don't arrive naked and cover yourself salt.

Read and understand your side before opening your mouth

You are not the first person to be in this sort of situation. Hell, you're probably not the first person to have an internet argument about whether or not jerking off to vampire hentai is gross. Well, for a lot of topics beside that one, there is probably a long line of established literature and possibly papers that likely present somewhat compelling arguments for your side. Going into a debate with creationists you can probably pull out lists of rebuttals for days.

If you don't actually understand your side, and if you can't thoroughly articulate what you believe in before you enter the debate you won't win anyone over.

Understand the other side before opening your mouth

Do you only understand your enemy from a ridiculous caricature? Maybe they're not as bad as you think they are. Maybe the arguments they actually make are much more subtle and difficult to pick apart than what you has been distilled and packaged for you. It's important to look at what people actually say, see if it's actually disagreeable, and see what is actually wrong and adjust your caricatured argument against it to a real and compelling one.

Quick check: Are you wasting your time?

Some people aren't ever going to be convinced because they are so wrong that their utter wrongness is backed up by even more wrongness in an infinite series of indescribable stupidity. Their worldview is so utterly fucked that, if their worldview were a bunch of hair you were trying to comb through, it would be Polish plait. It might be downright fascinating to debate such a person, perhaps even fun to uncover how weird and warped everything is. But you likely won't be able to convince them, and it's possible that you will be so dumbfounded by the tangle that it will look to an outside uninformed observer as if you lost the debate because it is a downright struggle to figure out how to untangle all the shit.

Sometimes people don't arrive into positions by their own volition but rather through their feelings, or perhaps it was a position that their parents molded them into and they never entertained any other possible answer in the first place. To break such a case poses an additional and deeper challenge because you have to construct something that would present a deep emotional contradiction within themselves. If you don't think you can do that, you're better off just letting go and letting the feces of the ensuing flame war fly elsewhere.

Is it too late to delete your message? Maybe you'd be happier if you just didn't bother this time.

Agree on definitions

You can't get anywhere if you can't ever figure out what the things you're debating actually are. This requires both sides to reach some sort of consensus, or at the very least, to understand the definition that one side is using, and rebut arguments based on that definition. If nobody can agree to do this, you're all wasting your time. You're now in the stupid hole, and will now debate in circles over literally nothing.

Have a standard of truth

This can be really hard these days because nobody likes to listen to a place that might accidentally damage their carefully hand blown, crystallized and now precious worldview. These solidified worldviews have been catered to an absurd extent, so we end up with situations where people just share what they've found in their own ideological trashcan and complain when the other's garbage heap smells different. Such is life in the post truth world people have willingly made for themselves.

Is what you're citing a fact, or an opinion?

Is it an opinion that a fedora is an ugly hat? Is it an opinion that humans came from monkeys?
If you answered "no" to any of these questions, please click here.

Stop with your anecdotes

I know you might think your personal experiences are important, but they aren't. Your anecdotes might make you feel better that you hold a certain position but they don't count for shit. A statist was mean to you once? Poor you. That means that person is a dick, but that's not an argument against statism, and will not impress anyone.

Stop with your quotes

Stop with your smug one line Margaret Thatcher and Leon Trotsky quotes. Those are very cute in your little echo chamber but all they do is inflame and piss off your opponent. Telling what someone else thinks about an issue is nice, but I want to know what you think. How about you present a real argument?

"But what about Y?!"

Stop it. Bad. No. Put that talking point back into the unwashed orifice it came from you dense motherfucker.

If X does a bad thing and Y also doing a bad thing does not shield X from any criticism. All you have proven is that there is more than one shitty thing in this world that demands criticism, and we already fucking knew that.

Let's say I take your taco. "You stole my 99 cent taco!" you say. "Yeah I did," I smugly reply. "but what about that time you spilled coffee grounds on the counter and didn't clean it up for 3 weeks?"
Are you going to cede that taco just because you also did something affably terrible in the past? I brought up an issue, yes but I sure as hell didn't absolve myself from stealing your taco.

Admit you're wrong

Sometimes, you fuck up. You learned bad information from a bad source and it was just never contradicted by anyone with a competent tongue. That's okay, we're not all perfect. We can be wrong. The important thing is to admit when you are wrong, and learn from it, so you can be a better and smarter person instead of bullheadedly sticking to what you initially thought. In that way, you can make a "loss" into a win. Otherwise, you've trapped yourself in a stupid hole.