Sidebar: Oh The Strawmanity!

In the course of my YouTube experience, I ran across a lot of people who used logical fallacies, particularly in the debates concerning religion.  Since my conservative counterpart focuses on them in his fact-check project, blog, and in commentary on Facebook, I also realized that this may have been the same place where he honed his skill on spotting/using them, besides that which he received in his education.

 

A straw man is an argument based on misrepresentation of the opponents' position.  The trouble with straw man is they are often thrown around like so many straws.  They are a logical-fallacy way of saying in your opinion the opponent is lying.   Some people will use them if they don't have anything else to argue with, like an accusation that bears a slight relation to the claim, so it's often difficult to distinguish whether it's really a straw man.  In other words, like everything else, logic can be abused.

 

My main defense (more than once) of PolitiFact's choice of the 2012 Lie of the Year--Mitt Romney's attack ad in the electoral-college crucial state of Ohio where there were several Chrysler plants, that its Jeep division was going to build cars in China--was its cruel inference that those Ohio plants would close.  If I had written that defense today, I would have stated it differently:  Romney's statement (and the ad) were straw men.  He misrepresented the position of Fiat-Chrysler and he misrepresented what Obama did at the time.

In a statement from Fiat-Chrysler management, it refuted that very misrepresentation.  In Obama's case, that was pretty much left to the fact-checkers.

But that is not really the point of this post.  The point is as I wrote it in the way I did, my counterpart attacked me by saying my arguments were straw men--as he stated, "an impressive array."  In other words, he was defending Romney's straw man by claiming those who said it was not true were using a straw man (not just PolitiFact, but Factcheck.Org and the Washington Post). He was doing the very thing that I had seen done in YouTube and Facebook commentary:  when all else fails, bring out the straw man.  Now I understand.