Strawman Has a Point/Other Media

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Examples of Strawman Has a Point in Other Media media include:

• In The Secret Life of Dolls:
  • Anna is persistently paranoid and accusative of Edward, which the author condemns her for. However? Edward Tallen is a dangerous, antisocial dollpire—and just committed pre-meditated murder.
  • This was darkly foreshadowed, when Anna insists that the reason she wants to kill Edward is that killing vampires is what her family does. Cleolinda says "Yeah, well vampires are supposed to eat people and he's not doing that!"
• A somewhat famous example from Computer Science: "Worse is Better", a famous paper describing two methodologies of software development. The "New Jersey" methodology (called "Worse is better", thus giving the paper its name) is purposefully set up as a strawman, to contrast with the approach the author was trained in, the "MIT Approach" (called "The Right Thing" methodology); and yet, it turns out to be "better" at certain things, even in strawman form. Acknowledging this fact is part of the point of that section of the paper.
• Most Robot War stories want us to sympathize with the humans. But in most every case, the humans started it, and the robots are defending themselves, if being extreme about it.
• In almost any given story where the hero argues that If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him, the point of the opposing side — usually that the ends justify the means and that taking one murderous life to save many innocent ones is nothing like taking many innocent lives for selfish reasons — will come off as this to a fair amount of people.

• Conversed in a criticism of the Straw Feminist trope by Feminist Frequency. Anita Sarkeesian noted that while most such characters are portrayed as being always wrong, many of the actual points they made are perfectly valid, and points out that many of the writers of such characters seem to confuse real feminism with "female supremacy".
• The Epicurean trilemma is probably a forgery by Christian philosophers who were unhappy with some of his other ideas (like Cessation of Existence and ataraxia), since it first shows up in anti-Epicurean/anti-Stoic works written under Constantine and doesn't quite fit with the theology of Hellenistic Athens. 1400 years later, Hume felt Epicurus, well, had a point, and "his" presentation of the problem of evil has since been a fixture in works attacking the idea of a single, benevolent God.

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