Our current struggle with fallacy-ism is that we use it to argue about stuff in our everyday lives. Sometimes people just don’t need to explain why they like or don’t like something, because we’re emotional creatures. Sometimes we don’t even know why we like or don’t like something, but we shouldn’t be required to give a water-tight example of why we like or don’t like it.

I really like your patchwork analogy because I always think of ideas as a boat with fallacies being flex tape. If I just put flex tape on a tiny hole in the back of my otherwise usable boat because I don’t like water splashing on my leg and making my pants wet, it’s really not that important and more of a personal preference thing.

If I have to wrap the whole middle of my boat so it doesn’t split in half, I might just need to accept the fact that it’s no longer seaworthy.

This. One of the biggest mistakes English class ever did us was convince a bunch of people that fallacious arguments are wrong BECAUSE they’re fallacious.

So often in debate nowadays even among intellectuals we see this unending need to prove someone is wrong through how they say something instead of what they’re saying. As a result “debate” has just become this jostling of seeing who can spot the hole in an argument first and declare it to be wrong.