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A lot of people come into otherwise serious discussion to play around.
-Ok, trolling can be a lot of fun but the fun but it's not very fun for any of the victims-
but my concern here is that trolling is becoming easy. Besides the people who blatantly flame them (either ignorant of how that will encourage the person to keep trolling, perhaps more than they had been, or ignoring that tidbit of knowledge,) the people who actually try to deal with them but keep the conversation don't know how to do it.

This particular entry deals with the people who are familiar with debate and try to apply it's terminology to Gaia discussions.
So, without further adieu, here's the relative part of a post I typed up in some thread a minute ago.



To the rest of you who are upset about annoying logical fallacies: Logical fallacies are fallacies for a reason- they don't actually work. The reason logical fallacies have been named is so that you can skip over them in debate as it's a waste of time to explain the fallacy in the company of your intellectual peers. They should know what it is.
Gaia, on the other hand, is anything but a group of intellectual peers- the audience it appeals to is much broader so naming a logical fallacy doesn't mean as much to them. For this reason logical fallacies require a little more attention. Anyone who's spent much time here should be able to see this.

It isn't difficult to tear them apart. I know that most of you are clever enough to do so, you're just not used to it. In the worst case scenario all you have to do is apply the same bad-logic to some other situation where it's clear that it doesn't work and toss "this is why that's a logical fallacy" on the end of it.
Or if you're feeling playful you can out-fallacy the other person in an escalating battle of convolution until they can't keep up anymore an then at the end say something along the lines of "alright, let's get back to reality" without trying to be too much of a snob about it.


Anyway, my point is that logical fallacies aren't just a group of questions that someone said, 'Ug, that s**t hurts my head. Stop doing it because I can't answer those. They're offffffff limits now." They're logic that's got a stupid, little, obvious flaw in it.
That people like Brandan "sick of the world" Cromartie [2] (if that is your real name,) think they're unanswerable is demonstration enough that just pointing out which fallacy they are doesn't have the impact it's supposed to.
So take a minute of your time the next time someone insists on leaving logic out of the equation and show them why that's silly, by example if need be.