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the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
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Rule 9: if you post ironic rage bait im going to make a personal visit to your house to make sure you never make this mistake again
Redditors absolutely have a particular way of communicating online. This is peak "I'm an American and everyone has an accent except me" brain.
Of course the Redditor is a fallacy-hunter. Imagine my shock.
I haven't read the discussion but most shit tier fallacy-hunters will invoke the strawman fallacy simply because they feel that you haven't accurately represented their position or they feel that your opinion on their position is incorrect. That ain't a strawman; a strawman is creating a distorted caricature as a representation of their position and arguing against that rather than directly addressing their position in order to "win".
For example, saying "social democracy is the left wing of fascism" in response to a person extolling that political orientation might get you responses about how you're strawmanning but expressions of opinion or making statements about how you perceive social democracy does not a strawman maketh.
As for the non sequiturs and red herrings, this shouldn't even register in a discussion except in edge cases. Discussions online are not formal debates and you don't get to impose your parameters for what is considered relevant to the discussion. If you don't see the relevance, just say as much.
There's absolutely no need to cloak your rhetoric in the language of fallacies in most situations.
Logical fallacies are meant to be used as a way to identify errors in your own line of thinking and others so that you can respond appropriately. Being familiar with logic and fallacies can be useful to draw upon in discussions but they should be used to inform how you present your arguments and how you respond to others.
It isn't some scoreboard where if a person commits enough fallacies then the other person wins smh.
I feel like there's something uniquely cringe about the way redditors seem to love more than anything to invoke the names of the fallacies. Like if someone's argument isn't sound it's totally reasonable to point that out, but the redditbrain seems to only care about naming the fallacy rather than actually doing that. Of course there's also just the fact they're just wrong a lot of the time. Like yeah for sure believing in cause and effect is definitely a slippery slope fallacy you got me
Exactly.
99% of the time when I see someone invoke fallacies I'm like "...okay, so what are you going to do about it?" and almost all the time they don't do shit. It's just self-aggrandizing nonsense because saying "You just insulted me! How dare you!?" would get you laughed at online so instead they wrap that same sentiment up in fancy Latin terms so they can feel smug about it.
The only time I ever really use logic terms in online discussions is when people slip into syllogistic reasoning because it's a shortcut and trying to expound upon what a syllogism is to a Redditor is hell because they always dig their heels in and nitpick your examples or they'll object to the example entirely (because Redditors are gonna Redditor) failing to grasp that you're actually just trying to communicate something like, no, being a vegetarian doesn't make you a Nazi simply because Hitler was (allegedly) a vegetarian.
Trying to handhold Redditors through this sort of thing is my own fault though and I only have myself to blame for it.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9