the_dunk_tank

Just say informal logical fallacies aren't real and ask them to prove to you that they're actual logical fallacies worth caring about. Even Wikipedia has this blurb:

The traditional approach to fallacies has received a lot of criticism in contemporary philosophy. This criticism is often based on the argument that the alleged fallacies are not fallacious at all, or at least not in all cases. To overcome this problem, alternative approaches for conceiving arguments and fallacies have been proposed. These include the dialogical approach, which conceives arguments as moves in a dialogue-game aimed at rationally persuading the other person. This game is governed by various rules. Fallacies are defined as violations of the dialogue rules impeding the progress of the dialogue. The epistemic approach constitutes another framework. Its core idea is that arguments play an epistemic role: they aim to expand our knowledge by providing a bridge from already justified beliefs to not yet justified beliefs. Fallacies are arguments that fall short of this goal by breaking a rule of epistemic justification. In the Bayesian approach, the epistemic norms are given by the laws of probability, which our degrees of belief should track.

All these nerds did was memorize the Wikipedia list on informal logical fallacies without understanding what informal logical fallacies are supposed to be. Appeal to authority is a good example. It's all well and good until it has the "it isn't appeal to authority if the source is an actual authority" clause. But therein lies the rub. Everyone appeals to what they believe to be an actual authority. Nobody appeals to the authority of who they believe to be an incompetent person. So, the informal logical fallacy called appeal to authority doesn't exist because no one is foolish enough to purposely appeal to a source that they themselves feel isn't an actual authority. I could go on. The vast majority of claims of ad hominem aren't actually ad hominem, but just generic insults. And even with actual ad hominem, ad hominem presupposes that there's no casual link between a person's idea and a person's action or character. You can see this with the type of ad hominem tu quoque. Tu quoque is just calling your opponent a hypocrite, but if one didn't separate one's thoughts from one's actions like some idealist liberal, then suddenly tu quoque isn't so fallacious. Why haven't your argument materialize in the real world, as demonstrated by you failing to live up to what you've just argued? Could it be that your argument is actually trash and you are completely full of shit?