I hope your game in court isn’t this weak. UFC identified each belt holder as HW GOAT. That is a fact. Not a strawman. Using the wrong words can get you in trouble in court. And fans have agreed with the bullshit line. Also a fact. The only argument is whether that fan position is influenced by the marketing line or not. Good luck arguing they are independent-minded geniuses not influenced by the UFC marketing... not working out for you so well up to now.
Ok, let's dissect this line by line.
No one was disputing the fact that either party identified the HW belt-holder as the goat. Though that could be disputed and brought to a line-by-line review that would be mostly a linguistic debate. The contention is not even that one party could not believe, even in part, the belief in question because of the other party. Your contention is that the UFC's case is unknown to its propagators. Your contention only works under the assumption that the only reason the propagators believe their belief is because the UFC told them. That is the strawman. The strawman is not the content of the argument. The strawman was the rationale behind the argument. If you believe that A for reason B +C, and I say that you believe A for reason C only, C being intentionally insufficient to reach a conclusion. Then that is a strawman.
Your syllogism is another red herring. If you haven't noticed yet, I have a little training in dialectics. You have to be a lot more creative with your fallacies if you want them to work. Let's recall my two points before we restate your syllogism. My two points are A. you shouldn't insult people on questionable grounds, and B. the debate you brought into question is arguably unintelligible. Here's your syllogism.
UFC says A
People who follow the UFC Believe A
Therefore, People believe A because the UFC says A
Ok, even if I don't contest the syllogism. Which I could, but I see a bigger target. What your syllogism needs to say is
UFC says A
A is a stance in an argument X with intelligible parameters and an intelligible path to Truth or Falsity
People who Follow the UFC believe A
People who Follow the UFC cannot know the rationale behind A
Therefore, People believe A because and only because the UFC says A
Therefore, People who believe things because the UFC says them are worthy of insult
Nowhere in your syllogism do you address the question of whether or not the GOAT debate is even an intelligible debate. Nowhere, either, does it logically follow from your syllogism that you are in right standing to insult people. So your syllogism actually says nothing. It is not clear that this debate is intelligible from your syllogism. Even if we granted you that, it's not clear that being wrong on one given topic makes one a moron. We each have many gaps in our knowledge. Even if they were morons, it is not clear from your syllogism that you have the right to insult them. All your syllogism would prove, if we choose to grant it to you, is that people believe something because the UFC says so. Let's move on to the part that interests you more. Why should we grant your syllogism to you? As is, it is underdetermined, because it requires another premise that says must say both that the UFC's argument is unknowable to its propagators and that UFC commentators are not credible sources of information on the topic of MMA. The key point is that your syllogism doesn't make the UFC's grounds for arguing that case irrational or unknowable. Let's first address unknowable. It's not at all clear that the UFC's grounds are unknowable because arguments have existed and have been propagated in these debates to rationalize these viewpoints, which would suggest that, even if they are flawed, these arguments are knowable. In case you are unaware, it is possible to believe a claim both because an expert told you the claim, and because you agreed with some elementary rationale behind the claim. In fact, most of our beliefs are like this. Most of us know very little about the scientific data, tests, or other crucial premises behind the theory of climate change, for example, and yet most of us believe it. The same goes for most medicines. Most people know little about amoxicillin, only that it is an antibiotic and antibiotics can be used to treat infections. We can believe the doctor when he argues that the amoxicillin will treat the infections, not solely because they doctor said so, but also because we know that amoxicillin is an antibiotic, and antibiotics can be used to treat infections. This is, in fact, true for most of our beliefs, because most of us are either field experts in only one subject area, or perhaps in two, but certainly not in every subject area. We may hold a belief both because of some elementary rationale we are given, and because of the authority behind that rationale. Which goes to the first irrationality aspect. Even if they had no rationale, it is not clearly an irrational behavior to believe a field expert. If an expert tells your something about a matter in their field, you will probably believe it. You will probably believe it despite not coming to this information yourself. It isn't clear that this is irrational. It's certainly not apparent that this makes you a foolish person, it's definitely not apparent that this makes you deserving of insult and ridicule. In fact, the opposite might be true. If a field expert told you something and you consciously chose not to believe it, that might also seem irrational to some. The second irrationality aspect is simply that it does not follow from the fact that you believe something that the field expert told you solely because the field expert told it to you (which is the conclusion of your syllogism) that the conditions to prove that the field expert's logic is flawed have been fulfilled. In fact, they two arguments are disjointed and don't seem to impact one another. Whether you believed a certain belief based on an expert's recommendation really has no bearing on whether or not that expert's rationale follows. And that doesn't even begin to address the intelligibility question.
Now let's consider your inevitable counterargument. Your inevitable counter-argument is "but here I have a counter-argument to the UFC's argument." And? If you were unaware, experts disagree all the time, and on any given topic there may be multiple if not infinite plausible answers or theories. And these are to legitimately intelligible questions, such as questions in mathematical fields, not some nebulous question such as "greatest MMA fighter of all time." You may have received instruction from doctor A to take drug X. Doctor B may disagree with the prescription of that drug in the context entirely. He may have reasons behind his disagreement too. That doesn't make you an idiot for believing one thing or another. Disagreements happen all the time. Someone may have one contention, with some rationale, and you may have an opposing contention, with your own rationale. The existence of disagreeing viewpoints falls woefully short of what should be the threshold to insult others or call others idiots.
When it comes down to it, you're just looking for an excuse to insult others you think are inferior to you. I consider that bullying.
Of course there is a power imbalance. One message has 0 dollars behind it while the other has a billion behind it. No amount of attacking me will change the fact that fans who swallow the propaganda line are not thinking for themselves. Nice try though. If your argument holds little weight you can always toss a phrase like “strawman” in there in efforts to convince others that 2+2 is actually 5.
But you aren't calling the message "morons". You aren't calling the propagators "morons". You're calling your fellow man a moron. You keep losing sight, intentionally or unintentionally, of your own arguments and what they require. If you were to say "the UFC is incorrect for X claim, therefore it is an idiotic organization", I would agree. There is a power imbalance. But you aren't attacking the UFC, or the sense in which you are attacking the UFC is indirect.
See, there is that arrogance again. You believe that if my argument was unsound, and others saw it, so long as I threw in what you consider to be a big word, it would appear to others that my argument was sound. You think others are so beneath you in your ability to reason. And that you see the truth. You know what 2+2 is here, though we are not dealing with mathematics in the slightest and there isn't the framework for deliberation on this topic like there is in mathematics (peano axioms, for example). You have such a lowly view of others. It's no wonder you have no qualms insulting them.
