Interjecting is what you call it when you disregard the topic being discussed, qualifications made to observations, you don't read the data in the footnotes...etc.

Steven Pinker: The surprising decline in violence

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115

Filmed Mar 2007 • Posted Sep 2007 • TED2007

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

to which the counter=argument is somthing like this:

The biggest problem with [Pinker], though, is [his] overreliance on history, which, like the light on a caboose, shows us only where we are not going. We live in a time when all the rules are being rewritten blindingly fast—when, for example, an increasingly smaller number of people can do increasingly greater damage. (Scientific American)[1]

I don't fully dis-agree with this latter qualication. If you go back and read my initial comments, you will see this.

[1] from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bookreview-...; See also: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-decline...