Ignoring the trollz

John Oliver’s doing a bang-up job on the Daily Show, and he’s implemented the don’t feed the trolls policy with Sarah Palin. Salon’s got a brief discussion HERE.

One question about iron-manning is whether even addressing the argument given is appropriate.  That is, how John and I have been working with the Iron Man has been to take the fallacy as interpreting the opponent’s argument in the best possible light and addressing that version.  But sometimes, we can iron man when we just spend any time at all on an argument.  That is, if Iron Man is fallacious because of (a) the waste of time and energy on an opponent’s argument, and (b) thereby giving them more intellectual credit than they deserve, then the improvement of the argument isn’t the core of the fallacy.  Rather, it’s in the misuse of dialectical resources on a dumb argument.

 

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