You're flat out wrong, and it's clear that you don't understand what a strawman is. It is more than just 'misrepresenting' your opponent's argument, which in any case I didn't do.

A straw man is where you present a weakened form of your opponent's argument in order to more easily defeat it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

As you have now acknowledged, I did not present any form of my opponent's argument at any time, let alone argue against it. What I did was to ask a question to put his statements into context.

This sentence implies that your opponent's position is: "US and British protectionism didn't have more influence on the rural poverty in China than decades of isolationist Maoism." Perhaps you are not a native English speaker and didn't know the implications of using a negative form question. Regardless, you were attempting to use this misrepresented position to win an argument as you later demonstrated in the thread.

All conditions are met to qualify your comment as a straw man fallacy.

The rest of the thread doesn't show me attempting to win any argument. I suggest rereading that too.

Whichever way my interlocutor responded to my question would neither invalidate his own position, nor 'win' an argument for me.

You are mistaking this form of discussion for a straw man because you are seeing things in black and white, when instead the question was intended to provide context.

Sometimes people ask provocative questions in order to better understand where other people are coming from. Dialog consists of more than just direct argument. Not every exchange is about gaining rhetorical advantage.

If you try playing back the comments in your head as if they are being spoken by a collegial group involved in a discussion, you'll see what I mean.

Your judgement is incorrect because you have misidentified the nature of the conversation. You are imagining there to be an argument where instead there is actually a discussion.

And on this note, do you really think it's helpful to throw comments like "straw man" into conversations you aren't constructively participating in?

You are right, thanks for correcting me, I'm a bit tired. Luckily, it was just an example and not central to my point. The key point here is that this way of formulating a question attributes an opinion to your opponent that he may or may not have. Fixed it: "Decades of isolationist Maoism didn't have more influence on the rural poverty in China than US and British protectionism."

> The rest of the thread doesn't show me attempting to win any argument. I suggest rereading that too.

At this point, there's nothing I can do but question your intellectual honesty. The least I can say is that you come across as someone who disagrees with your interlocutor's opinion. If you are not willing to admit that, I will call this conversation over.

> And on this note, do you really think it's helpful to throw comments like "straw man" into conversations you aren't constructively participating in?

Yes. Fallacies are subtle and it's important to highlight them.

I don't think that the relatively emotive statement that the interlocutor made paints a particularly complete picture. That's why I asked the question. I don't know enough of his opinion to disagree with it or not because he didn't answer.

If you reread what my interlocutor wrote you'll see that he introduces a number of different ideas which don't add up to a single coherent argument to agree or disagree with.

Typically when someone presents me with this sort of communication and I find it interesting, I don't consider it an argument. Instead I try to find out more.

You say 'all you can do is to question my intellectual honesty', but if you really thought I tried to win an argument using a strawman, you would be able to point out where I did that and yet you can't.

If you won't acknowledge the possibility that you have perceived an argument in what was actually a discussion, then I have to, in return, question your intellectual honesty.

It's counterproductive to the cause of rooting out fallacies to make drive-by comments out of context.

Surely since there are two different periods here is it not sensible to suggest that the two are not directly comparable in effect, although both have contributed to the history of the country.

One important question in this could well be whether imperial attitudes by the uk and us might partially be responsible for the development of maoism in the first place, and on reflection it seems more than obvious that they must be to at least some degree.

Also, if protectionism, which is notably bidirectional, isn't the root cause of rural poverty in China, do we have any reason for believing that unilaterally abandoning it would alleviate the poverty?

There was a reason the sun didn't set on the British Empire.

God doesn't trust the British in the dark.

[edit] and it is very difficult to separate war from protectionism as they are all on a sliding scale of policy.

Why isn't protectionism just part of the terms that nations negotiate when they trade?

And when China tried to ban British Opium, we were very annoyed indeed.

Short of eliminating national borders, I don't see how this would go away.

The idea that protectionism is a major factor in war has long been around;

Frederic Bastiat - "When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will" (possibly not him, but commonly attributed)

Carl von Clausewitz - "War is a mere continuation of politics by other means"

Henry Kissinger - "if protectionism grows in America or if China comes to be seen as a long-term adversary, a self-fulfilling prophecy may blight the prospects of global order."

Francis Sayre - "The policy of excessive protectionism is like a habit-forming drug. Nations once indulging in it go on from excess to excess; and the appetite increases. But the end of unrestrained indulgence is disaster. Economic nationalism and protectionism spell disaster for the world as well as for the nation...Men will fight before they starve. Uneconomic trade barriers forge the thunderbolts of war."

Sorry for the appeal to authority in using these quotes, but the simple fact is that even if you tried to create a protectionist policy that avoided associations with war wherever possible, the people who implemented it would still see it in military terms as a link between the two has been a fairly common consensus on most sides of the debate for a very long time.

Having said that, these quotes are good to see.