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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I thought I was attacking the point of the metaphor by being equally colorful...

...Does... Does this mean colorful writing can get in the way of productive conversation...? (No, it is the children who are wrong!)

Oh, no, I enjoyed your colorfulness. I'm still hung up on this comment because I think focusing on the molten iron slag metaphor pedantic. Colorful writing can get in the way of productive conversation, sure, but I feel like we here can handle it better than in many other forums because of the userbase and the rules. I learned something today, and that's awesome, because I had believed that McDonald's coffee was abnormally hot when it actually wasn't. I came into the thread with that old understanding, and I enjoyed ABigGuy4U's response because it colorfully confirmed my priors. If the counter to that post stopped at the differences between iron and coffee, I would have learned that comparing coffee to iron is wrong in some contexts, the end.

Instead, there was a discussion, and I took the time to ask an LLM, and it turns out that was wrong. Rereading, I also notice that this may have been implied earlier in the thread but without enough details for me to learn from it: I didn't know what side the fact sheet from the American Trial Lawyers Association took. I don't think the criticism should be on the colorful writing, because even if ABigGuy4U's point was made without metaphor it still would have been the same root error of believing McDonald's coffee was dangerously hot compared to other coffees.