Strawman
Other Names
Description
There are some debates that you cannot win. But if you have a captive audience, then faking a win is good enough. Strawmanning is when you give your audience both sides of a debate, but you misrepresent the other side by changing or omitting important details so that your position sounds superior.
This is commonly used by the media, because they know that their audience mostly only gets their information from a small number of ideologically similar sources.
Example
Mr Coolguy: We must cut our bloated defense budget so that we can afford the health care and education that we need to ensure adequate quality of life for all of our citizens.
Strawman version reported on Pox News: Politician Mr. Coolguy doesn't care about our national defense.
Famous Examples
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Look, when you realize how fake it all is; the football, the basketball, the Lady Gaga, the Justin Bieber—you know, who gives you these carbon tax messages... They tell your kids they gotta love Justin Biebler, and then Biebler says "hand in your guns", "pass the Cyber Security Act", and "the police state is good", and then your children are turned into a mindless vassals...
Context: The "Justin Biebler" Rant -
Bernie wants us to live under the heavenly socialist–communist system like China. We never hear the left criticize that Mao Tse-Tung killed over 80 million people—the Chinese government admits—biggest mass murder in history.
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Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition — and we can call it the superstition of materialism — which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe.
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No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can’t find the point where these molecules became conscious.
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From a scientist’s perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.
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The idea that evolutionists try to get across today is that there is continual upward progression. They claim that everything is getting better, improving, all by itself as if there is an inner-drive toward more perfection and order.
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Millennials attending college today live in a bubble. They believe that progressivism is the cure for all of America’s problems, that conservatives are a bunch of racists, bigots and homophobes, and nobody can tell them otherwise.
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If a 30-year-old man can declare himself to be a 30-year-old woman, why can’t a 70-year-old man declare himself to be a 15-year-old girl and go back to high school? The “magical thinking” buffoonery of transgenerism [SIC] is now eroding its way into “trans everything-ism,” as now demonstrated by certain individuals who believe they are animals.
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The problem with the global warming narrative, of course, is that it contradicted the scientific evidence which clearly showed the Earth wasn’t warming as had been frighteningly predicted by apocalyptic global warming alarmists. So they changed the narrative to “climate change,” which is now recognized as one of the most stupid-headed science fails of all time.
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Now, thanks to the climate change hoax narrative, a shockingly high percentage of liberals actually believe that there were no forest fires, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no floods, no droughts and no snow storms before the invention of the combustion engine (and the subsequent burning of fossil fuels).
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Instead of the warming we were promised by Al Gore, we’re actually getting subzero chills across much of the country. The National Guard has even been mobilized in some areas to deal with the extreme cold and snow fall. How is this possible if the Earth has been “warming” for a couple of decades as Al Gore promised?
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Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god.
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