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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yesway Jose" data-source="post: 5644657" data-attributes="member: 6679265">I guess it depends how "anal-retentive" is being applied. In real life and especially on forums when we don't have emotional cues, when a person states an opinion, the parameters are not always understood and must be assumed rightly or wrongly. (We know this when you recently interceded in an argument on the Modular Madness thread about subjective opinion vs perceived statement of objective fact.) For example, I could have attacked Mark CMG and demanded substantiating evidence for the existence of Proposal-free Wednesday. I didn't, though, because I know he wasn't being sincere. That is, I understood the general parameters of his statement to be humor or sarcasm. Declarations of fallacies and sorting of objective facts from subjective opinions are only useful when they're not extraneous to the context. So Person A says something. Person B feels that their position has been distorted and misrepresented and declares some fallacy is in effect. Person B fails to acknowledge that maybe Person A was never talking about Person B's premise, or changed the subject never having agreed to be bound to Person's B premise. Person B declared a fallacy without knowing what the parameters are. That would be presumptuous, and presumption (or a misunderstanding resulting from the presumption) can read as belligerence, and belligerence breeds belligerence. I'm not suggesting the above is happening *most* of the time. Wrongheaded opinions and trolling is very problematic but I don't think it's as systemic these days as it was during the Great Editions Wars of '08 to '09 (I bow to your greater experience in these matters). I think (and yes, the irony of my own presumption is not entirely lost on me) that most people are well-meaning and a common problem is when someone in logic-nerd mode misunderstands the parameters and not everyone is playing by those inferred rules. For example, my wife is prone to certain logical fallacies. Even if we weren't married, I would never call her stupid, nor would I accuse her of a straw man argument, because she would just roll her eyes and call me anal-retentive. Furthermore, even if her argument is technically fallacious, it doesn't mean she's wrong, it just means she didn't know how to articulate her point. So what exactly is accomplished when we're talking past each other like that -- unless the point is just to argue for its own sake?</blockquote>

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