**“i can’t hear you! I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”
**
Catch 22.
I actually find the period thing handy.
It means, “the foregoing is as much thought as I am willing or able to put into this discussion, so you may rest assured I will not say anything else worth listening to on the topic. That is, assuming I said anything worth listening to in the first place.”
I can’t seem to figure out the difference between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ fallacies. What’s the difference?
One has a name with big words in it.
It’s almost as if “formal” and “informal” are reversed.
The argument that things said or written by religious believers are automatically not trustworthy.
The “You Live in Your Parents’ Basement and Can’t See Anything Out of Its Tiny Windows” fallacy is popular in online sports discussions, whereby the set of statistics that you use to support your argument are a bunch of trumped-up nonsense that indicate only a narrow-minded calculation fetish, while the set of statistics that I like are based on an inherent and closely observed love of the sport. This can only be countered by the “Slightly Less Accurate Is Always Totally Wrong” fallacy.
It has a cousin, which might be seen from this example:
“Gay marriage is a right, because {Argument X}”
“But {Argument X} would logically excuse cannibalism! Are you sure that’s a good argument?”
“OMFG you just equated homosexuality with cannibalism! Bigot! Homophobe!”
The oxymoron fallacy. “Fox News may be biased, but at least they are OBJECTIVELY BIASED.” That one left me walking away shaking my head.
Ah yes, avoidance & distraction. I’ve seen a lot of this on the net.
That one’s my favorite.
The Acronym Fallacy also applies - if you can come up with a comic version of the stat’s acronym, it is no longer valid.
See, e.g., Pull Every Conclusion Out The Ass.
It is a well known fact that 93.275% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
“President Obama’s critics are just angry that a black man is president.” Seen quite frequently, including on this board. It’s a subset of the fallacy that “Any white person who criticizes a black leader must be a racist bigot.”
It’s not seen frequently at all. What is frequently seen is the idea that some of Obama’s critics are just angry that a black man is President, which given the Birther movement is obviously true.
Wouldn’t that actually be a pretty solid example of a strawman?
[quote=“Haunted_Pasta, post:19, topic:531904”]
The opposite of the “My opinion = fact”, where facts are just opinions. This is disturbingly common among the fundamentalist set, where science is not to be trusted and the common man knows more than the expert.QUOTE]
Oddly I find this much more common in the atheists on this board.
“It’s true if I believe it”.
Or it’s cousin;
“You’re angry. Therefore this isn’t about whatever the hell your real point is, it is all about how you’re angry and how WRONG that is.”
Fallacy of the Unseen Alternative:
“Oh, that [Politician X]! He’s screwed up the country so badly!” We don’t know if Politician Y (if elected instead) would have done better, or worse, or what. I hate this “argument”-that whatever X has accomplished it is typically implied that it is the worst of all possible worlds. Same applies to the arguments about religion (“If our civilization never had any religion to begin with, we’d all have been much better off”, vs. “If everyone converted to Fundamentalism, we’d all be much happier!”), or sports figures who are perceived to have underachieved or choked. In Red Sox fandom I get a lot of the latter-c.f. Jason Varitek or J. D. Drew, whose contracts were seen as poor deals, but there simply aren’t enough decent hitting catchers (much less those who can really rake, like Joe Mauer), or RFers who can both hit and play Fenway’s big RF well. The One Data Point Makes for a 100% Incontrovertible Conclusion" fallacy, if you will. Related to the Grass is Always Greener on the Far Side of the Septic Tank fallacy.