"But Rachel also has another hobby, one that makes her a bit different from the other moms in her Texas suburb—not that she talks about it with them. Once a month or so, after she and her husband put the kids to bed, Rachel texts her in-laws—who live just down the street—to make sure they’re home and available in the event of an emergency.
“And then, Rachel takes a generous dose of magic mushrooms, or sometimes MDMA, and—there’s really no other way to say this— spends the next several hours tripping balls.”
He said that shrooms are safer. You thought the argument he made was that shrooms use would lead to a decrease in cocaine and heroin use. They aren’t the same argument.
A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.
And I did not do that.
I asked him if that’s what he was saying (and I honestly thought it might have been). I was asking for a clarification.
I didn’t misframe what he was saying and then refute it.
Ehh that’s fair. I guess I’m so used to the use of clarification questions(often ones that are asked in the most infuriating way possible) as a lead up to and reframing of a conversation into an area that it didn’t originally start as, that I thought such actions that you took as equivalent to strawmanning.