Wrong. What needs to be demonstrated is that anyone, anywhere, at any time, has taken the view you are calling a straw man.
No. A "strawman" is a misrepresentation of an argument that you present and criticize as though it were your opponent's actual position. A poor argument's being espoused by someone, somewhere, has nothing to do with whether the person you're engaging (i.e., me) has employed that same argument. That's not changed by "setting the bar higher" to require that a "significant number" take that position. If those other arguments being made by someone are to have any relevance to this discussion, you have to relate them back to what I've said - which is just that other people's reactions can be a relevant consideration in determining the merit of my own behavior.
Basically, you don't seem to understand what a strawman argument is. Go google it or something. When I (correctly) described your response to me as a "strawman," I wasn't saying that literally no one espoused that position, because that's not what a "strawman" is. I was saying that you were ascribing to me a position that I do not in fact hold and that cannot be properly inferred from anything I'd said - a position that happened to be easy to reject as absurd. Hence, a "strawman."
And the link I provided demonstrated exactly that, despite your wholly unsubstantiated claim of its irrelevance.
I quite clearly did substantiate my claim that your internet poll was irrelevant to the point you claimed it supported - which, remember, was itself irrelevant to whether your claim was a strawman in the first place. You may not buy that substantiation, but normally that means you have to explain why you don't - you're not entitled to just dismiss it out of hand as inadequate.
Personally, I think that my substantiation was quite elegant. To repeat: We can't infer from the way one responds to a poll that asks whether "offensive speech" ought to be subject to "legal curbs" their views on how one is to determine what "offensive speech" is; and a person who follows what you would view to be an acceptable standard for "offensive speech" could consistently be either "for" or "against" legal curbs of such speech. If that's so, then the poll you've cited just doesn't tell us anything about whether anyone believes that the sole criterion for determining whether speech is offensive is how someone else reacts.
no subject
No. A "strawman" is a misrepresentation of an argument that you present and criticize as though it were your opponent's actual position. A poor argument's being espoused by someone, somewhere, has nothing to do with whether the person you're engaging (i.e., me) has employed that same argument. That's not changed by "setting the bar higher" to require that a "significant number" take that position. If those other arguments being made by someone are to have any relevance to this discussion, you have to relate them back to what I've said - which is just that other people's reactions can be a relevant consideration in determining the merit of my own behavior.
Basically, you don't seem to understand what a strawman argument is. Go google it or something. When I (correctly) described your response to me as a "strawman," I wasn't saying that literally no one espoused that position, because that's not what a "strawman" is. I was saying that you were ascribing to me a position that I do not in fact hold and that cannot be properly inferred from anything I'd said - a position that happened to be easy to reject as absurd. Hence, a "strawman."
And the link I provided demonstrated exactly that, despite your wholly unsubstantiated claim of its irrelevance.
I quite clearly did substantiate my claim that your internet poll was irrelevant to the point you claimed it supported - which, remember, was itself irrelevant to whether your claim was a strawman in the first place. You may not buy that substantiation, but normally that means you have to explain why you don't - you're not entitled to just dismiss it out of hand as inadequate.
Personally, I think that my substantiation was quite elegant. To repeat: We can't infer from the way one responds to a poll that asks whether "offensive speech" ought to be subject to "legal curbs" their views on how one is to determine what "offensive speech" is; and a person who follows what you would view to be an acceptable standard for "offensive speech" could consistently be either "for" or "against" legal curbs of such speech. If that's so, then the poll you've cited just doesn't tell us anything about whether anyone believes that the sole criterion for determining whether speech is offensive is how someone else reacts.