"But Rachel also has another hobby, one that makes her a bit different from the other moms in her Texas suburb—not that she talks about it with them. Once a month or so, after she and her husband put the kids to bed, Rachel texts her in-laws—who live just down the street—to make sure they’re home and available in the event of an emergency.
“And then, Rachel takes a generous dose of magic mushrooms, or sometimes MDMA, and—there’s really no other way to say this— spends the next several hours tripping balls.”
That’s not what a strawman argument is.
He said that shrooms are safer. You thought the argument he made was that shrooms use would lead to a decrease in cocaine and heroin use. They aren’t the same argument.
A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.
And I did not do that.
I asked him if that’s what he was saying (and I honestly thought it might have been). I was asking for a clarification.
I didn’t misframe what he was saying and then refute it.