On Behalf Of The Cunctator
At least according to Wikipedia, "the straw man rhetorical
technique is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than
your opponents actually offer."
Have you ever heard the saying, "Don't eat where you crap?" :)
That is what people have been doing.
Your use of the word "crying"--when describing what people
are doing in a textual medium--unnecessarily vilifies the posters.
For one, slippery slope arguments are fallacies too.
When debating our policies, pointing out resulting troubling scenarios
and possible degradation to Wikipedia's reputation is a valid exercise
given Wikipedia's stature and importance. Slippery slope arguments are
not inherent fallacies.
And, yes there have been charges of strawman, right in the first
sentence of several posts on WikiEN-l (not particular to either side).
-Fuzheado
FULL POST:
At least according to Wikipedia, "the straw man
rhetorical
technique is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than
your opponents actually offer."
That is what people have been doing.
Your use of the word "crying"--when describing what people
are doing in a textual medium--unnecessarily vilifies the posters.
In most of these cases, discussion has consisted
of
reasonable "What
if..." and "slippery slope"
arguments when standards for
"articleness"
are lowered. This is not automatically a straw
man, and in
most posts
here, they have not been straw man arguments at
all.
For one, slippery slope arguments are fallacies too.
Secondly, you actually made a straw man argument again: "when
standards for 'articleness' are lowered". I am not advocating
lowering standards for 'articleness'. Rather, others are
advocating changing the standards, and claiming that the new
standards are the "real" standards and that any other
position is for lower standards.
Thirdly, slippery slope arguments are generally connected to
a further straw man argument when the "what if" scenario is
deemed to be bad and used to attack the original position.
Finally, I hope you're not trying to characterize what James
Duffy wrote above as a reasonable "what if" argument.