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It's getting unavoidable - the quality of news and novel information obtained from time here is crashing. I used to hear things here first - now I usually don't hear them here at all.
Recently I brought up Rich Men North of Richmond - only because no one else did - and pretty well everyone shit on it for one reason or another. 'Should've sang about this instead,' 'this song is better,' 'why'd he bring this up' etc. But it's the biggest song on the planet. You were all wrong and I was right to bring it to your attention. How can we raise the quality of posts back to be worthy of attention, so readers are informed about developments in the culture war?
"It went viral, therefore I was right and you were wrong" is a silly argument, and just reads as a complaint that people are talking about the things they want to talk about instead of the things you want to talk about. What news do you think is being "missed" here? Rich Men North of Richmond was talked about here for its culture war angle. What is your grievance, that no one liked it?
To everyone who thinks we talk about the wrong things, the response is the same: start a thread and prove you have something more interesting to say. This ain't it.
Why 'paraphrase' (read: make something up) rather than respond to what I actually said? I asserted that it might have legs. Turns out I was right. How is that an argument at all, much less a silly one?
Dude you did basically the same thing by 'paraphrasing' (read distilling his post down to the core issue without using any of the same words) him. It's an effective rhetorical technique because it tells your opponent how you read their comment - what you got from it - while lowering the chance of confusion by eliding any other elements which might get in the way, and generally tells readers what the focus of your post will be.
Like any rhetorical technique it can be abused or used poorly. If I took your op -
And decided that because you said the words 'shit' and 'here' and 'everyone ' and 'is' I should reply with -
Then I would obviously just be making something up because my ego wouldn't let me admit you have a point. But 'It went viral, therefore I was right and you were wrong' is what I thought you were going for too - and by focusing on that we have discovered the point of contention - you weren't making an argument at all, you were using the conversation about the song to illustrate the dip in quality you had seen.
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