When I was in high school aeons ago, one of the vice-principals (looking back, he was probably the right age to have done his military stint during the Korean War) had a brilliant inspiration: the school would convene an assembly at which the student body would be given the opportunity to hear from a defender of the global communist conspiracy. Of course, the featured speaker was no such thing, but merely pretended, quite ineptly, to be an ardent apologist for the USSR. The idea was that we would hear these egregious arguments and our eyes would be opened to the folly and wickedness of socialism.

I don't know whether the plan was for Comrade Bill to acknowledge the masquerade at the end, but he never got that far. I mean, first of all, only the dimmest bulbs imagined that the school administration was going to allow, much less sponsor, a genuine red-fanged Marxist-Leninist to address their little charges. I mean, this was the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1969. And second, the guy was such a transparent tool that within minutes the audience grew restive, and muttering rose to shouts and to hooted derision: "This is bullshit!" At least half the audience walked out. Discipline, shall we say, broke down. A faculty member told me some years later that the VP had wanted the "ringleaders" punished, but that the principal realized that no imaginable sequel to the episode could possibly yield a good result for the school.

I have always thought that setting up strawmen is in almost every instance a dishonorable rhetorical technique. If it's done, it must be clear by design that the argument is being framed to its disadvantage by way of bringing into starker relief its falsity and flaws. Unfortunately, I do not see this kind of honest restraint much practiced on the innertubes.

cordially,