I guess I ultimately didn't do a good job in my original article.

I am trying to point out widespread human tendencies in argumentation toward treating both argument and evidence as semantically empty tokens in some abstract game of Mancala. "If I get my tokens across the board (meaning, you ignore certain arguments because you find them petty or irrelevant, etc.) then I win!" It is a natural category of bad-arguing that I'm trying to highlight.

I think you may simply lack a referent for the phenomenon I am describing. In which case, consider yourself lucky. Again, I see this ramshackle logic on my Facebook feed all the time because many of my Facebook friends were debaters. I was a debater, and I learned to recognize the difference between "debating logic" and "actual logic" in my own thinking. It is highly salient and singular to me, and having recognized its failure modes, I now see it elsewhere as well.

Perhaps a clarifying point would be this: The purpose of argumentation for a flowsheet-arguer is to "win" by getting their argument to the "right side of the page". In other words, they value the appearance of winning above any other aspect of the argument. They don't particularly care whether it's a good argument, they just care that their opponent can't/won't refute it. They don't even need to believe their own argument. (Policy debate trains you to not need to believe your own arguments.) This is the problem with the mindset.

In contrast, I think a healthier purpose of argumentation would be to find truth, or to persuade, or even to exercise logical skill. Putting too much weight on the appearance of winning interferes with these loftier aims.