{"id":5098,"date":"2017-02-22T16:43:42","date_gmt":"2017-02-22T21:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5098"},"modified":"2017-02-22T16:43:42","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T21:43:42","slug":"strawmika","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5098","title":{"rendered":"StrawMika"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A longstanding way to think of straw man argumentation is to misinterpret or misrepresent what people said or what their arguments were.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a version of the representational<\/strong> straw man. John and I have also identified the selectional<\/strong> version of the straw man, or the weak man.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a case of finding a member of the opposition that has a badly stated version of the view or a poorly constructed version of their argument and go after that.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a bad argument, but what gets communicated with it is that you, in investing time and energy in replying to that bad argument, you’re not spending time on the better ones.\u00c2\u00a0 That would be bad use of your time, so if you’re doing the work of criticizing the bad arguments, they must be as good as they get.<\/p>\n

Another weak man instance is that you take imperfectly phrased versions of an opponent’s posiiton and interpret them mercilously.\u00c2\u00a0 When we’re speaking off the cuff, extemporaneously, we may not say everything just right.\u00c2\u00a0 And so we, except when in full-attack mode, give each other some slack.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a difference between spoken and written communication.\u00c2\u00a0 And to interpret your interlocutor in the worst lights when they are speaking informally (and so, imprecisely) is a kind of selectional straw man.<\/p>\n

Well, so here’s what happened. Mika Brzezinski<\/a> said on\u00c2\u00a0Morning Joe\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>today that the media’s “job” is to “actually control exactly what people think.”\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s the clip:<\/p>\n