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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7770756" data-attributes="member: 4937">The essential technique and attitude involved here is to forgo the rhetorical principle of charity, wherein if you want to pick a fight with some idea, you are obligated to pick a fight with the strongest proponents of that idea you can find.  If you think you are the sort that can, as you put it, "take a piss out of particular subject" then you find the biggest, strongest, most well armed opponent of that sort and take that person on, because only by doing that are you really proving anything.  In a debate, you only seek out your peers, and you contest with the strongest versions of their argument.For any position or group or culture, you can always find people that poorly represent the group they are nominally members of, all of the time or some of the time.  It's always possible to conduct a ton of interviews, and then selectively edit your footage to only show the people that represent things poorly.  If this is your technique for proving something, you can prove anything you care to.  This sort of thing has become normal.  Both the left and the right have teams of people now who go out in the world seeking the looniest footage from the most disturbed individuals they can find in order to make those people represent the 'other side'.  Then they say to their stalwart partisans, "This is who we are fighting against.  Are you not entertained?  Are you not outraged now!" And that is not even the most insidious employment of this technique.  A really good one frequently employed is to say nothing about a person at all until they give you the footage that you want, at which time it becomes a story.  You can hound a person all you want behind the scenes and never report on their answers or behavior.  Eventually, you'll record a slip, and then you make that the thing that the person is known for.</blockquote>

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