Friday, October 26, 2007

The Most Annoying Thing in Blogtopia.*

If I never, ever, ever hear anyone accuse another person of making a strawman argument in a comment thread ever again, I will die the happiest woman on the face of the planet.

I know I've complained about this before, albeit in a sort of veiled, ranty way. But it's really really annoying me recently.

Even worse are the hyphenations. "Straw-feminist" is a particularly common one. Even more awkward is "straw-animal rights" or "straw-AR." Somewhat more lyrical are "straw-theist" and "straw-atheist" which kind of sound like the same thing.

And you can totally see them coming, too. You get to a certain number of comments - oh, about 87, I'd say - and you're guaranteed to get a cry of "straw-whateverthefuckitiswe'retalkingaboutthisweek!"

Please, people. There are other logical fallacies you can accuse your opponents of. Whatever happened to good old ad hominem? It's been ages since I've seen that bandied about.

*Yes! skippy coined that phrase!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know how you narrowed it down to just the one, but this is definitely an annoying one! Oh how blogtopia loves cliches.

Vanessa said...

Well, I'm sure there's more. This is just the most annoying thing at the moment.

And yes, it gets very predictable around here, doesn't it?

Anonymous said...

Oops - I've used strawtrans woman and strawtrans person, but I was deliberately doing it to mock the "strawfeminist" comments that get made whenever transphobia gets brought up.

Besides, I hate typing it out so much I don't do it anymore. :)