(no subject)

The most dangerous, because pretty much unavoidable, form of strawman we create is when we've identified some group of intellectual opponents - perhaps because they've identified themselves as one - and cobble the (from our perspective) worst features of individual members of that group into some Voltronic effigy none of them would much agree with, permitting us to then toss anything else said by any of them on the garbage pile. It is very easy to stop listening to anyone if you embrace this kind of shuffleboarding. But even if you recognize the danger you're going to do some of it as a heuristic, will be tempted to do a lot more if you get involved in controversies. It's not the kind of minefield you get to leave.

You can argue that the others are complicit in the mistakes of their fellow traveler by not denouncing them themselves. But pretty much everyone is easier on a friend, and it's no one's job to have attacked every single alternative position. A point comes when you're aiding and abetting real wrongs, it's true, but it's also very easy for someone on the other side of a divide to decide that you've reached that point much earlier than a detached observer might. No one thinks they're using ingroup/outgroup logic where ideas are concerned - these impulses do their work under the radar by slight nudgings of whatever arbitrary boundaries we put up in the many blur zones between our categories.