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Straw Man

Nobody demolished your argument. They demolished a cartoon version of it — and the audience didn't notice the swap.

A straw man is when someone replaces what you actually said with a weaker, dumber version of it, then attacks that instead. You say "maybe we should look at both sides of this policy." They report it as "they want to abandon all safety measures." You say "I have concerns about this drug's side effects." They hear "they're anti-science." The original position — nuanced, careful, reasonable — is nowhere in the rebuttal. A caricature took its place.

Media runs on this. Take a complex position, strip out the qualifiers, reduce it to an absurd extreme, then demolish the extreme on camera. The audience watches someone get "destroyed" in a debate and walks away thinking the original position was refuted. It never was. What was refuted was something nobody actually said.

The straw man works because nuance is boring and extremes are engaging. It's much easier to argue against "they want total chaos" than "they want a modest adjustment to the current approach with certain safeguards." One makes a great headline. The other puts people to sleep. So the version that makes a great headline wins — and the actual argument never gets a hearing.

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