Reading someone's mind and then asserting it as what they are doing and knocking that down (a classic strawman argument) is the rhetorical sleight of hand (and also an innate capability that develops from a very young age, as far as I can tell).

In fact, what I was actually referring to was the particular angle I am arguing in this thread, here on HN, an argument that has been opposed by nothing other than rhetoric.

> Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this site.

Framing the argument via semantics (cherry picking one word, that was placed within quotation marks to explictly* indicate that it is being used in a figure-of-speech manner) to (again) turn it into a non-representative proxy of the actual argument and then sidetracking the discussion onto that, is another clever rhetorical slight of hand.

What remains, unaddressed, is the original argument.

The tactics are annoying, but I don't mind so much - seeing them on full, unapologetic display is actually kind of the point of the whole exercise from my perspective.