This is an article that both does and doesn’t say much. It’s something that I’ll likely link back to a lot in the future so I might as well just put it down once. Want I want to talk about is the common habit of excluding the middle, more formally called “the false dilemma”, the “either/or fallacy” or a whole host of other things. It’s one of those things that I see people using all the time in Internet arguments.
Excluding the Middle
The idea here is that people have a tendency to play this cute little game where a given situation can either be exactly one thing (their preference) or exactly one other thing where that other thing is some ludicrous stupid-ass extreme example that they use to attempt to prove their preference simply by how extreme (and dumb) it is. But compared to something stupid, anything is better by comparison.… Keep Reading