The Danger Of The Fetzer Assassination School

[Greg Burnham]

Albert,

As a point of logic:

A straw man fallacy occurs when one participant in a debate exaggerates the argument of his opponent in order to more easily defeat that argument. I don't believe that you have demonstrated a straw man on Cinque's part in this instance.

No, he's clearly using a strawman. A strawman is when you set-up a straw figure that isn't a sincere effort to answer the main point and then knock it down with the suggestion you have answered the main point. Cinque has clearly done that with his post-Baker lunch argument while failing to answer why Fritz noted the Baker encounter well before mentioning "Out on the steps with Bill Shelley in front". Cinque knows there wasn't enough time for Oswald to eat lunch after the Baker encounter, but he's using it to avoid answering why Fritz wrote his notes in that particular chronological order.

No disrespect Greg but you are trying to use honorable rules of debate and logic with two WWF clowns in Fetzer and Cinque over there. Cinque is an obnoxious little pissant who doesn't belong in the same ring as the people on EF, who shouldn't be taking him as seriously as they are. I swear he's almost like a Saturday Night Live character in a skit.

Description of Straw Man

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a [FONT=arial !important]person[/FONT] simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:

1. Person A has position X.
   
2. Person B [FONT=arial !important]presents[/FONT] position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
   
3. Person B attacks position Y.
   
4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
   

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.

Examples of Straw Man

• Prof. Jones: "The [FONT=arial !important]university[/FONT] just cut our yearly budget by $10,000."
  
• Prof. Smith: "What are we going to do?"
  
• Prof. Brown: "I think we should eliminate one of the teaching assistant positions. That would take care of it."
  
• Prof. Jones: "We could reduce our scheduled raises instead."
  
• Prof. Brown: " I can't understand why you want to bleed us dry like that, Jones."
  

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html