#argumentation

Fatphobes LOVE red herring fallacies and strawman arguments. So let’s learn what they are together.

A red herring fallacy is a logical fallacy where a person responds saying something that might at first glance seem related to the actual topic at hand, but you’ll soon realize it’s not actually related and is just meant to take attention away from the actual topic and switch the topic at hand.

An example:

”Ozempic is not meant to be a weight loss drug and using it might cause many side effects that might mess with someone’s health, such as constant back pain. People need to consider whether possible weight loss is worth the side effects, and also the possible long-term effects from ozempic misuse that we’ve yet to discover”

Red herring: ”Well, dying at age 40 at 300 lb will also ’mess with your health’”

A strawman argument on the other hand is when one person asserts something that attempts to misrepresent the original message

An example:

”I love my fat body!”

A strawman argument: ”Oh, so you hate thin people then?”

Welp, I’m finally posting it.

I decided to post it as screenshots rather than just copy and paste, so apologies if you can’t see it.

I’m open to discussion and feedback, but please note that this has already been turned in and graded.

I got a 92, for anyone curious.

BUT

I really want to do a dissection of that one argumentative/rhetorical style that a lot of redditors and right-wing podcasters use

Where they speak in an academic tone but include deliberately inflammatory language to bait their opposition into anger

So they can say the people arguing against them are wrong because they’re emotional. And imply their opponents’ intellectual inferiority.

Those ppl are so annoying to argue with but they are almost always just empty of actual substantive analysis/are incapable of creating a well-supported and coherent argument

△➞ ://0006 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲

My biggest pet peeve is when someone begins to laugh at your position during a debate.

There's nothing funny about watching someone operate with a broken mental model of reality. It's actually sad - like watching someone navigate with a broken compass.

When someone starts laughing at your argument, they've already decided your mental model is worthless and your understanding is fundamentally stupid. They stop addressing your actual points and shift into performing ridicule. The message is clear: "I don't respect you enough to engage seriously." How can you have productive communication with someone who's essentially saying you're not worth the effort? It's not effective at all - it just kills any chance of understanding.

This gets worse in public forums. When there's an audience watching, people may feel even more compelled to mock. It's likely they're performing for whoever they think will agree with them, trying to rally their tribe and marginalize your perspective.

Why do they do this? It's simple. They're running your ideas through their consensus filter - their model of what they believe everyone knows to be true. But the bigger issue is that genuinely considering new ideas is physically exhausting. It takes real effort - cortisol, stress hormones, mental strain - to consider that what you think or believe might be wrong. So some people just give up. They don't have the mental energy for that. Maybe they're already stretched thin managing kids, careers, mortgages, aging parents - their cognitive resources are maxed out just keeping life together.

Sometimes what you're presenting requires them to overhaul their entire understanding of reality. That's overwhelming, I get it. But I can't stand someone disrespecting me with an "LOL" and no longer considering what I'm saying. Just stop talking to me if that's how it's going to be.

I imagine it like a soft— subconscious voice tells them they already know the truth and you're the stupid one. But it's never been about stupidity or being right or wrong. It's about discussing. Scientists estimate the human brain performs the CMOS computational equivalent of about 1 exaflop. When two people discuss, that's 2 exaflops working on a problem. Get 50 people genuinely engaging? That's 50 exaflops. We shouldn't limit ourselves to our individual processing power when we could be combining minds to actually understand reality. But mockery is exactly that limitation - a primitive monkey-mind tool that signals "don't climb the ladder" instead of explaining why the ladder might be dangerous.

It's a sad world when we stay in our little ponds, afraid of larger forums. We default to protecting the models we already have. It feels better than sitting with uncertainty you can't mentally or emotionally solve, than rebuilding your understanding, than admitting you might have been wrong about something fundamental.

But if you were truly confident in your understanding, why would you need to perform ridicule? It's fragile beliefs that need protection through mockery.

If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

Pyramid Chart Showing Accuracy of Different Counterpoints in Debate and Analysis

I hope i don't bother you with this long ask, but do you have any tips on how to become good at writing meta?

I like to read discourses/discussions in tumblr and learn from them but i still have trouble writing my opinions or even replying to arguments, english is not my first language but i read a lot of books and i don't have trouble understanding them i rarely come across a line that needs to be translated and so far it only happened with classics.

Someone suggested that i should always practice automating new vocabularies but i find myself forcing them alongside my childish writing and it turns out bad.

In other words, i don't have trouble when speaking, hearing or reading english but when it comes to writing i always get stuck.

Yes!!! I do!!!

Based on your writing in this ask, I don't think that your grammar or vocabulary would be an issue. Meta and analysis is much more reliant on critical thinking and being able to come up with questions that you can then investigate. tbh, anyone who would criticize your grammar instead of your actual thoughts isn't worth your time.

***I'm going to use a bunch of examples of fandom arguments or metas that I have seen, but I don't necessarily agree with them. I am just explaining how they work.

***One more thing, this is generally about developing and supporting arguments - analysis of a text is a separate though related thing and I have a post in my drafts about that. I will try to get that finished by the end of this week!

Make your argument clear. Complex grammar isn't necessary. All you need to do is make sure that you are using modifiers or hedging or contextualizing your claims. So for example, if I said "I think that characters will die in acotar5", that's super vague. What characters? Why? How? The conversation is dead before it starts. However, if I said "I think that Lady of Autumn will kill Beron in acotar5", that's put some parameters around my argument and now I have somewhere to start. I know what kind of evidence I will need. I know what characters I will need to consider. Also think about contextualizing, like "well if X happens, then this other thing is possible." Absolute statements (e.g. "Sarah has never written a logical magic system") will get you into trouble because they are easy to pick apart. Even if they are mostly true.

Have evidence! I always have the ebooks because they are easily searchable. You could also mark up your book, if you think you'll need that info a lot. I like to use colored tabs in my physical books, and sometimes I write notes in the margins. I got used to marking as I went when I was in university, noticing themes as I went along.

More on evidence: something that is just as important as having evidence is knowing how to use it. I see a lot of posts that are 20% writing, 80% screenshots from an ebook. NO. DO NOT DO THAT. Why? Because we've read the damn book. We know what it says. If I wanted to read the book again, I would read it again. That's not why I am on tumblr. The reason you are writing a post is because you have an argument. What is that argument? How are you interpreting that scene? What do you think is the meaning behind a piece of dialogue? Throwing a quote at your audience and hoping it sticks is not effective use of evidence. You've got to explain how and why you are using it.

Still related to evidence, is make sure that the evidence both means what you think it means, and that it supports the argument you think it supports. If you have evidence that is supposed to support one interpretation of the text as being more reliable than another (e.g. what a lot of the ship war arguments are doing right now), then you will need a lot of evidence that can be interpreted the same way. For example, I believe that Azriel has never truly been in love, and I have a collection of evidence that together supports that interpretation, even if on their own those quotes could be interpreted differently.

Think about the implications of your arguments. This means that if you say "Elain is sus", then you need to think about how her being sus would then impact the characters around her. How would that change the way we interpret her behavior? How is that related to what we currently know about her motivations and wants and needs and values? I went through this process in this post about whether or not she knows how the mating bond. I took someone else's argument, thought about who Elain is as a person, thought about the people closest to her, and what the implications of that argument are. We can't just say something like "Elain doesn't fit in with the Night Court" without then looking at her relationships and comparing them to other relationships, comparing her current relationships with her past behavior, etc. Basically what you're doing is testing the argument in different contexts and seeing if it still makes sense.

And yes, be respectful. People will misunderstand you. Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes just to be assholes. But we can't control their responses to us. Just on a basic level though, the moment someone feels attacked, they shut down. Conversation over. (The only exception to this is if the person is bullying, being racist, ableist, etc. Then fuck being respectful.)

Side note three, the stuff about evidence is one of the main things I teach my students and it's not an easy skill to master. It takes time.