On 2/6/06, Philip Welch wikipedia@philwelch.net wrote:
By "it" I meant "your personal crusade", not "the CVU", although I suspect you already knew that.
Well, since you're willing to give me enough credit to recognize antecedents, maybe you'd be willing to consider that I'm making a serious point, one that's been agreed with by other people. Are they blatantly trolling too?
If you just posted and said "Counter-Vandalism Unit is an unnecessarily aggressive name under which to organize counter- vandalism" that would be one thing. But you started with "Counter Vandalism Unit sucks and is a bunch of evil militarist jackbooted fascists!!" to get a bunch of responses on the mailing list. That's the textbook definition of trolling, or as we used to call it, "just trying to get attention".
That's not what I wrote. Mischaracterizing other people's words is the textbook definition of a strawman argument, or as we used to call it "just making stuff up."
Okay, we didn't call it "stuff".