Does this vairant of the "straw man" argument have a name

Its pretty common to hear people say something like this in any argument (if you don’t know what a tied pub and pubco is don’t worry, replace with drink driving, Obamacare, or abortion as a appropriate):

“If anyone tries to suggest that maybe the pubco isn’t totally responsible for their failure as pub-running entrepreneurs, that person will be subjected to howls – screams – of outrage and fury… However, it’s clearly nonsense to suggest that the pubco model is responsible for every operator of a tied tenanted pub who goes belly-up”

The key point being no one is arguing every time a “tied” pub goes out of business it is the fault of the tied pub model, any more than every time a smoker dies, it is the fault of smoking. Just that the model is responsible for a lot of pub failures and is definitely part of the problem of massive number of pubs closing in the UK. He does go on to address this a bit more rationally later in the article, but the first half of the article seems to me a classic “straw man”, or something similar to it. Does this argument have a name? It seems pretty common (I could have chosen an example from pretty much any subject).

PS: A British A tied pub is one tied to a specific brewery (or pubco). The landlord rents the pub from the brewery and has to buy all their booze from the brewery. The rate they pay for beer and spirits is usually more than they could get over the road from the liquor store, rent can be increased at the brewery’s whim (typically if the landlord actually starts making a profit), and the lease includes many conditions (my local pub has a condition that they cannot sell a main meal for less that 10 quid). I’d be happy to start a thread in Cafe Society about this anyone wants to argue about this :slight_smile:

Wouldn’t the pubco tennant be asking the pubco for help at the time he has dire financial difficulties ? And they say "too bad, bucko, you have to keep paying cash, for your beer and for rent, and for advertising, on time, and in full. We don’t care if you go bankrupt., we can sell the pub again to some other punter "

So the tennant can only try to blackmail the pubco by continuing to publish his anti-pubco tirades on any forum he can … including the blog you refer us to (as detailed by the blogger in the guts! he refer to the events, which he says is the shoot-the-messenger )

So the falacy seems to be exaggeration . He knows that most sane people don’t really believe its 100% the pubco’s fault ???

His opponents claim that X is a contributory cause of Y. He responds that X couldn’t possibly be the sole cause of Y. After all, lots of things can cause Y.

But he’s spent the first half of his article arguing against exactly that point (that apparently no sane person would beleive).

In that respect it is definitely a form of straw man (where you argue against a point your opponent isn’t making), but it is harder to respond to as you are sorta kinda making that point, just not in the extreme form that has just described.

Nope, it’s a classic straw man argument. However, he’s accusing his opponents of a one logical fallacy and making one himself that’re both very easy (and thus, very common,) for people to make.

He’s accusing his opponents of breaking the “correlation does not equal causation” rule of logic. Just because two traits appear together does not mean one causes the other. They could both be caused by a third force (which includes circumstance or pure random luck).

He’s making a logical mistake himself in thinking the news media (and the public discussions that arise from it) are a representative sample. News outlets only report on unusual circumstances so a pub succeeding under the pubco model wouldn’t be reported (unless it were rare). So, there’s no discussion about why the successful pubs are succeeding, just the failed ones. And when something bad happens, the media usually tries to find a somebody or something to blame.