Strawman Arguments

There have been a lot of interesting stories lately about little things like how the left hates "Baby It's Cold Outside".

To me, one of the interesting things is that I first heard about these things from the conservative people I know calling people stupid for complaining about them, rather than from the liberal people I know actually complaining about them. Particularly given that I have far more liberal friends than conservative ones, it's hard to believe that anything which is a common complaint on the left wouldn't come from the former group first. It almost makes me question how much the average liberal actually believes such things.

Sarcasm aside, it's worth taking a closer look at how and why we complain about small numbers of people complaining about random things. Sometimes it is appropriate to call attention to such things and make a point about poor arguments and extreme views. (If you're hoping I'm about to clarify whether or not I think the liberal complaints in question actually are that sort of extreme view, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you, though.) However, there's a dangerously fine line between doing it in a way that limits the scope to just the extremists in question and doing it in a way that tries to make everyone on the other side look like the extremists in question. I get quite tired of people complaining about how nasty the other side's discourse is and then doing things like the latter that simply add more fuel to the fire.

It's also worth looking at what we want done about the problems we complain about. Personally, I don't care if someone decides not to listen to a song or the like, whether their reasons are good or bad. That goes double if it's only a small number of people. Even if they start encouraging other people to do the same, it doesn't affect me much unless I care about their opinions of me. If they asked me point blank for my opinion, I suppose I might tell them, depending on how much I wanted to deal with an argument. But I wouldn't bother a whole lot more than that; their views simply aren't going to affect me much. It irritates me that many of the people I know that claim to be about personal freedom aren't willing to extend the same courtesy to their opponents.