Google cancels meeting on gender controversy due to employee fears of harassment

Re:Google cancels meeting on gender controversy due to emplo... by danso on Friday August 11, 2017 @02:05AM (#14986991)

Don't get me wrong, the rhetorical trick that idlewords is implied to use is just as annoying. Like, "If pro-life people truly cared about human and babies lives, why don't they speak up for single-payer healthcare?" It involves irrational assumptions and/or over-simplification of issues. And its implications are itself a logical fallacy: If people who support A also support B, and people who support C support B, then people who believe in A but not C are hypocrites

But No True Scotsman fallacies can occur without those pre-requisites and it's a common enough fallacy that it deserves its own term, so that it's easier to identify and denounce its use.

Also, I really want to know if there is a specific phrase/category that describes what idlewords is accused of, for the same reasons of easier identification and denunciation :)

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Re:Google cancels meeting on gender controversy due to emplo... by miranda_rights on Saturday August 12, 2017 @03:55PM (#14999645)

You're right, and I was wrong before - the example of "If X was a true Y, they would do what I say all Ys should do" seems like it might be related to No True Scotsman but it's definitely different. It seems like the fallacy would be in the speaker's definition of "a true Y", so maybe it's using a "Persuasive definition"[0]? I'm not certain, but I'm also curious if there's a better term!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_definition

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