You are aware that words are, in general, a way to package one's thoughts quickly? That's what the term is. Otherwise it takes longer to mention that someone is engaging in this sort of behaviour.
To be sure I'm not saying that bad argumentatives don't exist, aren't annoying (or even dangerous from an intellectual standpoint) or that labeling them is, in and off itself, a bad thing.
It's the... fetish for compulsively identifying, cataloging, naming, numbering and tracking bad arguemtatives and reflexively using nothing but that as your main argumentative style at the expense of the overall discussion as has become the backbone of internet (and broader cultural) debate.
Just because you slap an invented name on someone else's argument doesn't make it go away, to say nothing of disproving it or addressing it.
No there's not some single magical point at which this becomes a problem but at it's core it's the difference between:
Ted: I support X.
Bill: I feel that X will lead to Y
Ted: I disagree that X will lead to Y and here's why....
and
Ted: I support X.
Bill: I feel that X will lead to Y
Ted: SLIPPERY SLOPE! YOU MADE A SLIPPERY SLOPE FALLACY! I WIN THE ARGUMENT! AND THAT MEANS X IS TRUE!
I'm not supporting bad argumentatives. I'm just not liking how often discussion on the internet, even among otherwise intelligent people, turn into two idiots arguing by calling each other's arguments names instead of actually arguing or debating.
I'm just against the trend of condensing as many arguments as possible into quippy, "clever" one liners.
And in a broader sense I'm over meta. I'm over arguing about how to argue. You've seen it as bad as I have up in... that thread that shall not be named where one side is more interesting in the steps of the dance than anything else.
This is much more minor, much more good intentioned but at the end of the day still in the same broad category, rules lawyering.
Well, no. You have overlooked a rather critical feature of these protests: kneeling for the anthem isn't an argument. It may be intended to signal belief in an argument (though what argument isn't actually clear), but it sure as hell isn't itself one. So dismissing such a display is not, in fact, equivalent to dismissing an actual argument.
Again I don't disagree per se.
Okay feet to the fire. I'm pretty much over protesting as a concept. And before anyone starts I'm not talking about anyone's right to protest.
Just 99% of the time... I don't think it matters and I think the people doing it sorta know that. Most protesting seems to fall into the vague idea that the idea that they are wrong just never occurred to the other side and they are just waiting for you to tell them about it.
Bear with me a sec but I've got a weird parallel. You ever seen a really, really stupid PSA about doing something completely obvious? While I was in the military AFRTS (The Armed Forces Radio Television Service that provides American television programming to service-members and their families stationed overseas) was notorious for stupid, heavy handed PSAs. I'm not exaggerating when I say you could watch a normal prime-time television show and get reminded 6 times not to shake your baby.
And that always struck me as stupid. Nobody out there is shaking their baby because the idea that shaking babies is bad just never occurred to them. Nobody is drinking and driving because they've never been exposed to the idea that drunk driving is bad. Or as Denis Leary put it never has a smoking pulled out a pack of cigarettes, looked at the warning label and suddenly went "Holy $#@! This things are bad for you!? I thought they had Vitamin C in them and stuff."
Or all the "awareness" campaigns about diseases and social problems out there about things that pretty much everyone living in the free world knows about.
And to me most protesting falls under that same category. Pick any issue and, with only a handful of outlying exception, the problem isn't that the other side just isn't aware that there are people who disagree with them. Does anyone really think that hardcore "cause" people's problem, regardless of how you feel about the cause, is that they simply aren't aware that people who disagree with them exist?
Hell if anything it goes in the other direction where we have "causes" where... there's no other side. There's a scene from a movie or a TV show, not sure which one because honestly I've only ever seen it as a screenshot, where a guy is walking along a college campus and a woman runs up and shoves a flyer in his hand shouting "Stop cancer" and his reply is a, pretty reasonable, "Lady who are you yelling at? Who do you think is on the other side of this argument?"
People are a little too often want to act like people are "against" them when all that it is that they have different priorities. Nobody is "Against the Environment" in the abstract. They might put political freedom or business profits or whatever ahead of the environment and you might, rightfully, disagree with that but the real world is not full of Captain Planet villains who are going to hijack and oil tanker and crash it into a beach just to teach those baby seals a lesson and you can't frame your arguments in that context. They want something; either something literal and physical or something more tangible more than they want to help the environment but they don't hate the environment in a literal direct sense. They only "hate" the environment in the sense that it gets in the way of things they consider more important. (ETA: Or they are using the "environment" as a symbolic pawn in a larger Us v Them ideological way but the same argument still applies. They don't hate the environment, they like tweaking the liberals) People might have differing priorities as to medical ethics and how to properly spend a limited biomedical budget but nobody is going to take time out of their Sunday afternoon to walk around in front of the Mayo Clinic with a sign that says "More Cancer Cells!"
I know this seems like a little bit of a hijack but it speaks, I think, to the same broad mentality as what is being discussed when we talk about Virtual Signaling and similar concepts.
