Polemic: the art or practice of using language to defend or harshly criticize something or someone (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/polemic) 

• Do you find yourself lacking logic while arguing with people online or in person?                                           
• Do you get upset easily during these arguments and start to yell?
• Did you realize after the argument that your responses were not actual responses to what the person was saying but what you wanted to hear?

Then you could be a polemic during an argument. Kevin Bolk is the illustrator of the cartoon above. He uses the dialogue between these two characters to explain a polemic argument. One of the characters is a straw man. The significance of this character is that he ( the straw man) is demonstrating the type of person who uses the straw man fallacy. The straw man fallacy is a type of informal argument where the person who is the straw man argues their opponents views without actually responding to the issue at hand. The straw man just focuses on what he feels will give him the winning results in the argument without actually solving the problem.

The young boy starts off the cartoon with his thoughts on gender politics. He is giving his views without attacking and using logic. Before the boy could finish his thought the straw man cuts him off saying “hey! Why do you hate equality so much!?”. Nothing that the boy said had any indication that he hated equality. However, the straw man takes what the boy said and distorts his words into an argument he is willing to fight. Notice the straw man’s posture in the second drawing of the cartoon, he is yelling. When a person is yelling during an argument it indicates that they are emotionally invested. They utilize the tactic of yelling in their effort to overpower the other person’s logical argument. Thus, they yell louder to make their point seem significant so that they in the end win the argument with just rhetoric.

The formal fallacy relating to “gender politics” in the first scene of the cartoon is not even acknowledged in the second scene by the straw man. The boy reacts to the straw man’s yelling by saying “oh no I mustn’t argue with the straw man” and he has a point. No matter how sound, logical, rooted in facts an argument may be that is of no concern to the straw man. This can actually make the straw man more defensive, because he or she might feel that they are losing the argument and will just use informal fallacies and yelling to get their point across. In the third scene the straw man even lists the different components that make up a polemic argument and ends it with “or are you just repeating terms you read on the internet?” which is what a straw man does so he is just talking about himself in this case. The boy responds that he just wanted to sound clever, which is also what a straw man wants to do. A straw man wants to sound clever by using terms or ideas that he or she has done little to no research on and having an argument using informal fallacies by misrepresenting the actual argument so that he or she can win.