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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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"It went viral, therefore I was right and you were wrong" is a silly argument

Why 'paraphrase' (read: make something up) rather than respond to what I actually said? I asserted that it might have legs. Turns out I was right. How is that an argument at all, much less a silly one?

Dude you did basically the same thing by 'paraphrasing' (read distilling his post down to the core issue without using any of the same words) him. It's an effective rhetorical technique because it tells your opponent how you read their comment - what you got from it - while lowering the chance of confusion by eliding any other elements which might get in the way, and generally tells readers what the focus of your post will be.

Like any rhetorical technique it can be abused or used poorly. If I took your op -

It's getting unavoidable - the quality of news and novel information obtained from time here is crashing. I used to hear things here first - now I usually don't hear them here at all.

Recently I brought up Rich Men North of Richmond - only because no one else did - and pretty well everyone shit on it for one reason or another. 'Should've sang about this instead,' 'this song is better,' 'why'd he bring this up' etc. But it's the biggest song on the planet. You were all wrong and I was right to bring it to your attention. How can we raise the quality of posts back to be worthy of attention, so readers are informed about developments in the culture war?

And decided that because you said the words 'shit' and 'here' and 'everyone ' and 'is' I should reply with -

Whoa buddy, this is the motte, you can't roll in and tell people "everyone here is shit"!

Then I would obviously just be making something up because my ego wouldn't let me admit you have a point. But 'It went viral, therefore I was right and you were wrong' is what I thought you were going for too - and by focusing on that we have discovered the point of contention - you weren't making an argument at all, you were using the conversation about the song to illustrate the dip in quality you had seen.

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