It’s even worse than that. The attempt to persuade the audience rather than discover what’s true leads people to minimize the weak points in their own arguments and attack tangential weak points in their opponents’ ones even if it’s not really relevant to the overall thesis.

But that’s only if you’re lucky. Sometimes you get someone so craven and so set out for the W, they straw man, goal-post move, try to latch on to anything they can associate with something you said no matter how much of a non-sequitur it is, knowing zombies will hammer the likes and chime in with their own associations unitl the initlal post is no longer even being addressed at all.

I wish people were just using rhetoric to persuade an audience. That you can at least counter.