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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • So that’s where you want the goal posts now?

    I specifically agreed that reducto ad absurdum isn’t inherently a fallacy in the first sentence of my first reply to you.

    And that’s my whole point

    It is now that your original point that “there’s no such thing as a reducto ad absurdum fallacy” has been shot to pieces 🙄

    People use the term in a muddy way that takes away from a tool.

    That’s the case with almost every tool of every kind that people have access to.

    Especially in the case of language, people are constantly using it wrong, and while I genuinely applaud your intention of projecting a useful tool from being dulled by misuse, the battle is an uphill one to begin with.

    Don’t make it even worse by misstating your position and then defending that mistake like it’s the Korean border.



  • You’re fundamentally ignoring or misunderstanding what a fallacy is. Here’s the dictionary definition:

    Note that, by any of those 3 definitions, the argument that it’s absurd to take Ben & Jerry’s freedom of speech seriously because Trump is a fallacy.

    Just likely a slippery slope argument is valid when a certain course of action legitimately leads to increasingly negative outcomes (such as for example treating Trump as a serious candidate in the first place in 2015), a usually valid argument technique is fallacious when used fallaciously.

    And in case you still believe that nothing can be a fallacy without having the word “fallacy” in the opening paragraph of Wikipedia, I invite you to look up “hyperbole” and “slippery slope” there.