I am basically looking for the opposite of how Johnny responded to you. I think strawman and ad hominem fallacies are probably the two greatest banes of modern discourse.

It's worth noting that most ad hominems I see could actually also be counted as strawmen - because they usually involve one person projecting motivations onto another person - which means that the person they are arguing against is a person of their own creation - rather than the one who is actually there.

It's also worth noting that a lot of strawman arguments happen by accident, due to an honest misunderstanding of what another person was trying to say.

But so the real problem isn't just the initial strawman fallacy per se, but rather, a chronic refusal to let a person clarify their stance. In order to truly avoid strawmen, you have to keep avoiding them throughout a conversation, to make sure you are always checking to make sure you understand each other correctly. Otherwise, you just end up talking past each other, and aren't really having a conversation at all.

If two people can avoid ad hominems and strawmen, it really does go a long way towards having a good conversation.

As for your initial comment to Johnny, with the questions, starting with "Why is HAMAS not surrendering?", I will say that although you didn't explicitly include an ad hominem or a straw man, I think your last sentence could be interpreted as implying bad motives on those judging Israel as doing Genocide, and it sounds like that is how it was interpreted.

So I probably would have omitted the last sentence, and added some other language to explicitly say that I wasn't making any assumptions along those lines. Because even if someone does have bad motives, it's ultimately irrelevant to answering the questions.