In an environment where everything's fraught, it's remarkable how decent, educated human beings can fall into hostile discourse. Recently, I myself crossed the line several times.
There are fewer and fewer models of fair discourse out there. Unfortunately, that's not just true of, say, the Tea Party. Consider this: if most of us emulate the rightwing, why would electing Democrats make any difference? If our process is similar, our method of resolving issues will be parallel, if not the same. And we will default to our own biases, which are not always safe from flaws regardless of intention.
Still, can we set up a goal to Fight the Fallacies? If a few members of the community here actually agreed to standards of argument and drew attention to failures of these standards, at least among ourselves, we might have more productive arguments with fewer hurt feelings at the end.
So, in the interest of Fighting the Fallacies, I'm going to review ones I see happening in progressive discourse far too often. There are others which aren't so common, mostly because they tend to cluster around faith-based arguments. These are the just the ones which act as triggers to me:
Ad Hominem. There's nothing more fallacious than thinking that attacking a person, their suspected motivations, or the party s/he belongs to (or doesn't) proves the argument wrong. I actually saw a lot of these yesterday in a particularly contentious discussion of a post by Kos concerning internet elections. "Well, rightwingers are opposed to internet elections too, so you better rethink your arguments" is actually stupid irrational, okay? It proves nothing. It could be (if true, which the writers NEVER established; for all we can see proven in the argument, rightwingers are running through DC demanding internet voting) an orange flag to examine. But that's it. If Rush Limbaugh loved internet voting, it wouldn't prove that it was a bad idea. It would just prove Limbaugh expressed his populist side. If that.
Straw person. Sometimes if I've been reading what really should have been a jolly debate, I want to go to bed and pull the pillows over me. The straw person seems THE most popular fallacy in DKDiaryland. "This is what you're saying, and it's wrong" is a great strategy for argument -- but only when the arguer is being fair about what "this" is. (I'm on Clinton's side on this.) In a good argument (and admittedly internet thread arguments are structured to easily fail, in this regard) if an opponent is not making the clearest argument herself -- you check first to make sure. Not snottily, just carefully. "What I hear you saying seems to be that we should never, ever use the internet to vote. Is that right?" Such questions should elicit clarity: "No, I was saying we shouldn't think of using it unless we solve the problems of X, Y, and Z."
Now in the course of a GOOD argument, it's very possible that at this point the arguers may discover they agree. In which case, if they're not terribly argumentative kind of people, they'll stop arguing, and if they are (so many of us here are) they'll start picking at the details: "Okay, I buy X, but I think Y and Z are over-demanding, and here's why." Because both sides are being treated fairly, the argument goes forward, but the hurt feelings don't.
Distraction: Irrelevancies, red herrings, left field -- doesn't matter what you call it, it's when you move the conversation in a whole different direction. "I don't like your tone." "That's not an important issue." Etc. DK apparently invented a whole phrase ("concern troll") which is now in Wikipedia, specifically to use as a distraction. (See "namecalling" below.) Or maybe to identify distractions. I've seen it used more in the former case. Its usual result, regardless of intent, is to derail argument and crash into fighting. When the observation might be useful to the writer (for example, I was called "Patronizing" yesterday, which could have been useful information about my writing.) It's often worth mentioning, but if it's the most important thing you're taking away from someone's writing, you're probably either insufficiently invested or far too invested to engage in argument with that particular post.
There may be times that calling someone on sexism or skin privilege or whatever is essential, especially if you can't get past that, but trying to make the conversation about that instead of the "subject" is, in my opinion, just rude and ineffective. Critiquing the blindness caused by an ism is legitimate if in the process you're critiquing the conclusions -- but it's worth asking yourself, "Should l make my own post about this?" instead of simply invading someone else's topic space -- "But enough about your idea. Let's talk about mine instead." After all, if an idea is based on racism or sexism, usually it can be demolished quite nicely on its own merits.
Namecalling: I broke the distraction rule yesterday with Kos' post; he called opponents to what he was advocating "Luddites." I would probably have just ignored it, except that using the name seemed to permit various respondents to do the same to attack opponents. I decided a separate comment defending Luddites might break up the namecalling. I was quite sure that posting about that wouldn't turn the entire discussion to whether using "Luddite" was fair, but if I'd been the first responder, or the 10th, instead of the hundredth, I would have taken that into consideration and not potentially derailed the main point.
I have been called communist, socialist, liberal, radical, feminist, anarchist, sellout, self-hating Jew, race traitor, atheist, and various other names my whole life. Some of them were labels I'd agree with. However, when used as names, the important variable is what the user thinks they mean, not what I think they mean. With that understanding, every single label was an insult. It wasn't being used as shorthand, and I wasn't being asked anything: "Are you a liberal?" It was a dismissal of an argument. As such, it was a fallacy.
Under those circumstances, you can either ignore, disengage, counter-insult, or focus on the distraction. I think interrupting the dismissal of a whole class of people is worth engaging in, so there are times I do focus on it, even though that sails perilously near fallacious thinking. For example, Luddites were working class (well, technically bourgeois, I think) heroes. When they engaged against technology, they were representing their interests and fighting the ruling class. This is typical of history and why words like "anarchist" and "Luddite" and more recently "liberal" have become pejorative: it's in the interest of the ruling class to make sure those terms are negative.
Unfortunately, Progressives who insult fellow progressives by calling them "Luddites" apparently don't know what they're talking about. My impulse is to educate them so they won't do it again. For me, classist insults are like using racist words: inappropriate in polite discourse.
But generally, namecalling really is aimed at hurting the argument and the arguer. If someone calls me even a true name, the dismissal of what I believe hurts, and at some level, it's intended to. I'm likely to lash back, losing points, or even better from the opponent's side (if the writer just wants to win the argument) walk away and not engage. Namecalling is cheating, but it works.
And that's the problem with all fallacies. If I had my theorist's hat on, I'd talk more about how fallacies are not the same as falsehoods: how each of those can in fact be a useful consideration; that a twisting or reduction of someone's argument might be a great illustration, how someone having been a Nazi really does make their arguments about Jews suspect, etc. but the common understanding of fallacy is "false," and that's also a highly useful definition.
So I advocate that DK community members call their colleagues on fallacy use. Wherever names are thrown around, unfair summaries are made then mocked, ideas are dismissed because of the people who believe in them, and subjects get changed, these strategies maim if not destroy actual argument. They hurt the feelings of people who technically are allies. They're useful for winning an argument, but not for making decisions or solving problems.
And I'm sorry for my own contributions to those failures, whenever they happen.