A perfect example of "moving the goalposts" is an orange-faced buffoon calling for thousands of miles of concrete wall to be built then claiming they never said that and that a steel-slatted fence was always their intention. What's been going on here is not that.
While I agree that what has been going on here is not that, I disagree that what you've described above would be considered "moving the goalposts".
To quote Wikipedia, "
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is an informal fallacy in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded. That is, after an attempt has been made to score a goal, the goalposts are moved to exclude the attempt. The problem with changing the rules of the game is that the meaning of the result is changed, too."
In other words, it's not merely changing what you say, it's changing what you say
in response to being proven wrong, so that you're "not wrong" anymore. Trump changing the type of some hypothetical future wall isn't that. Adding further amendments to your original argument every time the argument fails, however, is exactly that, as it's done in response to being proven wrong.
You can piss and moan about "pedantry" all you want, but you have to look at it from our perspective. We're responding to what you wrote, and you're claiming we should be mind readers and somehow respond what you
actually meant instead.
If the "goalposts" have moved it's because a few pedantic people keep getting hung up over a generalised statement not being accurate enough for them and then when the statement is clarified further, they accuse that person of changing their position.
I haven't changed anything. Folk like you just can't seem to read between the lines of what a person is saying and find a kernel of truth.
"Folk like you"?
You mean the people who read the words you actually wrote, instead of things which you say existed in your head, but somehow didn't make it into anything you provided to us?
Ah, yes, how dare we
not read things into what you've actually written.
If you weren't clear, then that isn't
our fault, that's
yours. Take some responsibility for your half of the conversation, rather than blaming everyone else and getting angry at them when they point out the problems with
the words you actually wrote.
Also, I have yet to come across this "kernel of truth" you seem to think is there.
My original position was that nobody in the history of the world has ever used that word in that way but I have since been shown otherwise and acknowledged that. What followed was me holding up my hands to say, "OK, it has been used, but people in the real world don't say it like that", but none of you people can see that, instead trying to accuse me of somehow "flip-flopping".
We're not accusing you of "flip-flopping". Quite the opposite, actually. Changing what you believe based on evidence is entirely commendable, and it's horrible that anyone would try to portray that as a bad thing with such an absurd term.
No, what we're accusing you of is you still trying to be right, in the face of all of the evidence that you're wrong, when you repeatedly add caveats to what you meant after-the-fact, every time that someone demonstrates you're wrong.
The evidence is everywhere.
No, it's not.
An absence of evidence is
not evidence of absence. In other words, just because you haven't seen it, that doesn't prove that it doesn't exist.
The problem is that you're trying to prove a negative, and in this case, that's just something that can't be done. Thus you shouldn't be claiming it as truth.
As I said before, think about your own experiences, or conversations with your friends, or all the TV shows and movies that come out of English speaking nations, and tr to recall a single instance where anyone has referred to a vagina as "her sex". They don't because it's a commonly used in our everyday vocabulary and even the people here who keep trying to say I'm wrong have admitted it's primarily a literary term. Just because it's used in literature does not make it an everyday term. Think about how authors describe locations, objects, people; real, average people don't speak that way in their everyday lives. Therefore, seeing the characters in these games and VNs use this term, especially when the games have a modern-day setting, is very jarring for someone who is a native English speaker and knows this is not a commonly used term in today's society.
Your claim is that people don't do that, and your evidence is that you think people don't do that... You do realize that you've based your argument upon the presupposition that your argument is true, right?
What do you not understand about that?
The part where you extrapolate from the fact that
you personally haven't encountered the word "sex" used that way (in the rather narrowed-down case you limit this to), to that somehow meaning that
nobody has ever encountered it used that way.
You and I are not a particularly large sample size, and the fact is, it only takes one example to prove you wrong. This is an absurdly weak argument to hang your hat on.
Which returns me to the questions I've asked, which you keep avoiding answering:
What evidence would convince you that you're wrong that, "nobody in the real, modern, everyday, English speaking world" ever actually uses the word "sex" that way?
This seems like it should be a slam-dunk, easy-peasy, no-problemo question to answer, if you're open to correction, and yet this is the third time I've had to ask it.
Odd, that.
Look, I'm not trying to make you angry or insult you. I'm trying to get you to see what you're doing here, to understand the nature of evidence, and to perhaps think a bit more clearly about the kind of claim that you're making and the growing level of evidence you've demanded. If even
you can't figure out what would prove you wrong, then how can you expect anyone else to prove you wrong? And if you're not open to being proven wrong about something as inconsequential as this, then maybe you need to consider being more open about other, far more important, things as well.
I know we're waaaayyyy off topic here, but I believe that all of society would benefit from occasional moments of introspection like this. So, please, try to take it that way.
Have a nice day!
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Addendum:
I do so wonder what it must feel like to be so comfortable on your own high-horse as to act like you've never once in your entire life made a misinformed, general statement about something which you were then corrected/called-out on and then had to clarify in greater detail what you really meant by that statement only to then be accused of "moving the goalposts" despite having simply provided greater context to your original statement as necessitated by the correction.
But I'm not claiming that I've never in my life done that. I have. And I was wrong to do it. So I grew up and now I do my best to not make that mistake again.
However, the fact of my errors in the past in no way makes it right when you do it today.
All you're doing is invoking the "
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" fallacy to excuse using the "moving the goalposts" fallacy.
Two wrongs don't make a right (though three lefts do
).
