I Need A Drink I'm not sure if there's a specific term for the technique of rewriting a passage of prose to argue for the negation of said passage- I guess it'

I Need A Drink I'm not sure if there's a specific term for the technique of rewriting a passage of prose to argue for the negation of said passage- I guess it's a distilled reductio ad absurdum, one that's been fractionated away to retain the spirit of the already rather palatable, crowd-pleasing reductio form, discarding the rigour in the name of intensifying the flavours and improving the mouthfeel. The lack of rigour doesn't mean this class of analyses are wrong- it's just easier for logical errors to remain undetected, fermenting behind the devastating impression that the author's arguments can be used to prove anything, and thus prove nothing. It's hard to track these errors, flowing as they do through the unvalved, convoluted network of criss-crossing ambiguities and imprecision that is natural language and the degrees of freedom it affords when parsing a text. The distilled reductio relies on a gestalt dissonance between superficial similarities in tone and structure, and the inverted conclusion of the two passages, while never attempting to refute the arguments themselves. Of course, for the purposes of logical analysis, tone merely helps arguments go down better, and is irrelevant to the arguments themselves. The only thing that's really retained, then, is the structure of the arguments, and once you are allowed to swap out premises at will, the infinite malleability of natural language will allow you to transform any argument to fit the structure, like liquid conforms to the shape of a glass. We could instead engage directly with the arguments, claiming, for example, that Bitcoin is very much in the nascent stages, and aims to solve fundamental problems in the financial industry. Of course the current financial industry is better at a lot of things, we'd say. It's aged, matured, had an enormous superstructure of fixes and optimizations and safeguards built over decades and decades. It's equivalent to arguing grain alcohol is a better tech than battery-powered cars will ever be, while ignoring the enormous entrenched infrastructural advantages afforded to ethanol. And then we'd argue that comparing Bitcoin and the entire financial industry misses the point- you should be discussing decentralised vs centralised currencies. That's probably a more meaningful (albeit less entertaining) way of arguing against the OP. Of course, if you disagree with me, you could rewrite this comment, changing the content completely while carefully retaining all the supererogatory references to alcohol and drinking, and it would seem superficially comparable, especially if the post began with an anchoring catchphrase like "Why Do Decent People Accept Dollars", or "I Need A Drink."