This is a problem that everyone has encountered or will encounter, it's mostly prevalent on the internet and among less educated people who dont really know how to debate. This problem, if left unchecked can have serious consequences and change the entire course of the debate.
It seems like almost every time I make a statement, someone else in an attempt to "one up" me and just straight up lies and misrepresents my views, this is a dishonorable and disingenuous fallacy called a "strawman" where your opponent fabricates your position to make it easier for them to attack.
A real life example of this fallacy is if one person says that Public schools should not force children to pray, and then their opponent will accuse the other person of trying to spread Atheism. If I get aggressive and call out his lies and fallacies he will send me some religious verse that tells me not to get angry and tells me to "calm down" and "let your guard down" to appear as a higher moral authority to others and then completely ignores the fact that he lied about my views in the first place. What ends up happening is that I look like I am angry and my opponent looks calm and cool even tho he lied to get where he was.
The worst part is that that my community is filled with a bunch of retards who are too stupid to realize what going on and just go along with it. By the time I "pin down" my opponent for lying and misrepresenting my views, he moves on to another subject and does it all again. This process is very time consuming, and inefficient becuase my opponent continuously does the same thing over and over. The worst part is that my community can't tell the differance. It seems that if I ignore my opponent he will continue to misrepresent my views, this will result in negative publicity for me and more upvotes for him because by ignoring him i leave his argument uncontested. If I respond to him, it will just be a waste of his time becuase he won't admit his mistake or change his position and will continue to use the same slimy tactics over and over again.
My question is how do we deal with assholes who constantly lie and misrepresent my views? Do I just block or stop responding to them and hope they just get board and leave? Do I make an "Exposed" post on them? or I continue to waste my time constantly correcting them?
If you want to see exactly what went down, then please message you and I will send you the link to the reddit post where it happened.
NOTE: I am NOT here to debate religion, I just want to learn how to counter those who misrepresent views and commit fallacies when the observing community responsible for voting is blind to fallacies.
How to deal with assholes who constantly lie about and misrepresent your views?
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The Turbanator
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Re: How to deal with assholes who constantly lie about and misrepresent your views?
Page 34-35 of 'Therapy and Desire; Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics' could be of some help here:
…Cicero said that deductive argument does little to engage the ordinary hearer, or to probe into and alter the hearer's life. The philosopher who records and systematizes ordinary beliefs can use familiar dialectical arguments. She can elicit the ordinary beliefs by calm questioning and then do whatever dialectical manoeuvring needs to be done to achieve consistency. Medical philosophy cannot take this course either. For its task requires delving deep into the patient's psychology and, ultimately, challenging it and changing it. Calm dialectic does not probe deep enough to elicit hidden fears, frustrations, angers, attachments. If confusions are rooted deeply enough, it will not find them.
Thus medical philosophy, while committed to logical reasoning, and to marks of good reasoning such as clarity, consistency, rigor, and breadth of scope, will often need to search for techniques that are more complicated and indirect, more psychologically engaging, than those of conventional deductive or dialectical argument. [27] It must find ways to delve into the pupil's inner world, using gripping examples, techniques of narrative, appeals to memory and imagination-all in the service of bringing the pupil's whole life in to the investigative process.
Imagine, for example, how workers from the rural development authority would need to speak to the woman in rural India who says she does not want more education, if they want her to take the idea seriously and care about what they have to say. Clearly, a one-shot logical argument would do nothing to engage her; such a procedure would only reinforce her conviction that education has nothing to do with her. Nor would the exchange get very far if the development workers sat down with her like Aristotle in his schoolroom and asked her a number of calm and intellectual questions about what she thinks and says. But suppose, instead, they spent a long time with her , sharing her way of life and entering into it. [28] Suppose, during this time, they vividly set before her stories of ways in which the lives of women in other parts of the world have been transformed by education of various types- all the while eliciting, from careful listening over a long period of time, in an atmosphere of trust that they would need to work hard to develop, a rich sense of what she has experienced, whom she takes herself to be, what at a deeper level she believes about her own capacities and their actualization. If they did all this, and did it with the requisite sensitivity, imagination, responsiveness, and open-mindedness, they might over time discover that she does indeed experience some frustration and anger in connection with her limited role; and she might be able to recognize and to articulate wishes and aspirations for herself that she could not have articulated to Aristotle in the classroom. In short, through narrative , memory, and friendly conversation, a more complicated view of the good might begin to emerge. In short, what philosophy needs, practiced in the medical way, is an account of complex human interactions of a philosophical kind. And for this it needs to think about the uses of the imagination, about narrative, about community, about friendship, about the rhetorical and literary forms in which an argument may be effectively housed. Each Hellenistic school does this in its own way. But all agree that philosophy is a complex form of life with complex arts of speech and writing.
[27] For a contemporary argument along similar lines, see Charles Taylor (1993 ).
[28] This example is based on the actual narrative of such a process-in Bangladesh, not India-in Chen (1983).
…Cicero said that deductive argument does little to engage the ordinary hearer, or to probe into and alter the hearer's life. The philosopher who records and systematizes ordinary beliefs can use familiar dialectical arguments. She can elicit the ordinary beliefs by calm questioning and then do whatever dialectical manoeuvring needs to be done to achieve consistency. Medical philosophy cannot take this course either. For its task requires delving deep into the patient's psychology and, ultimately, challenging it and changing it. Calm dialectic does not probe deep enough to elicit hidden fears, frustrations, angers, attachments. If confusions are rooted deeply enough, it will not find them.
Thus medical philosophy, while committed to logical reasoning, and to marks of good reasoning such as clarity, consistency, rigor, and breadth of scope, will often need to search for techniques that are more complicated and indirect, more psychologically engaging, than those of conventional deductive or dialectical argument. [27] It must find ways to delve into the pupil's inner world, using gripping examples, techniques of narrative, appeals to memory and imagination-all in the service of bringing the pupil's whole life in to the investigative process.
Imagine, for example, how workers from the rural development authority would need to speak to the woman in rural India who says she does not want more education, if they want her to take the idea seriously and care about what they have to say. Clearly, a one-shot logical argument would do nothing to engage her; such a procedure would only reinforce her conviction that education has nothing to do with her. Nor would the exchange get very far if the development workers sat down with her like Aristotle in his schoolroom and asked her a number of calm and intellectual questions about what she thinks and says. But suppose, instead, they spent a long time with her , sharing her way of life and entering into it. [28] Suppose, during this time, they vividly set before her stories of ways in which the lives of women in other parts of the world have been transformed by education of various types- all the while eliciting, from careful listening over a long period of time, in an atmosphere of trust that they would need to work hard to develop, a rich sense of what she has experienced, whom she takes herself to be, what at a deeper level she believes about her own capacities and their actualization. If they did all this, and did it with the requisite sensitivity, imagination, responsiveness, and open-mindedness, they might over time discover that she does indeed experience some frustration and anger in connection with her limited role; and she might be able to recognize and to articulate wishes and aspirations for herself that she could not have articulated to Aristotle in the classroom. In short, through narrative , memory, and friendly conversation, a more complicated view of the good might begin to emerge. In short, what philosophy needs, practiced in the medical way, is an account of complex human interactions of a philosophical kind. And for this it needs to think about the uses of the imagination, about narrative, about community, about friendship, about the rhetorical and literary forms in which an argument may be effectively housed. Each Hellenistic school does this in its own way. But all agree that philosophy is a complex form of life with complex arts of speech and writing.
[27] For a contemporary argument along similar lines, see Charles Taylor (1993 ).
[28] This example is based on the actual narrative of such a process-in Bangladesh, not India-in Chen (1983).