A straw man [argument] is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the “straw man”), and to refute it, without ever having actually refuted the original position. (source)

A chronic conceit employed by the Left is the straw man argument — a foul stew of ignorance, projection, intellectual dishonesty, and a single-minded contempt for reality. It takes the natural (and often useful) human tendency to generalize and turns it into a pathetic mockery of debate.

round_up_the_usual_suspectsMost conservatives who have negotiated the fetid swamp that is social media have experienced the maddening (sometimes intentionally so) tendency of the Left to first tell us what we supposedly believe, and then attack those usually farcical “beliefs” as “sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic Islamophobic, racist and bigoted, not to mention anti-intellectual and anti-science.” (source)

And to complete the idiotic fallacy, the Left nevertheless unceasingly accuses us of being closed-minded, of living in an echo chamber, etc. — after having essentially engaged in an argument with their own cartoonish projections onto us of what we supposedly believe.

Sometimes one feels rude interrupting them as they are busily arguing with the stereotypical bitter clinger racist homophobe they carry around in their addled minds.

Of course, the logical fallacies that the Left necessarily employs (necessarily because Leftism is an emotive sham, contemptuous of morality and ignorant of economics) are not limited to straw man arguments. Far be it from me to minimize their talent in the areas of ad hominem, non sequitur, guilt by association, and on and on and on.

Are conservatives innocent of employing logical fallacies, or of accepting them as true? Alas, no.

But since Leftists are more likely than conservatives to believe that the ends justify the means; and since Leftists are more likely to embrace an Alinskyite strategy of tactical dishonesty as a chronic political methodology; and since Leftists are less likely to view truth as anything other than an oppressive legacy of patriarchy, let alone an absolute — they are inherently more likely to employ logical fallacies in the service of their ideology.