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The Scripted Message (also, Talking Points): A contemporary fallacy related to Big Lie Technique, where a politician or public figure strictly limits her/his statements on a given issue to repeating carefully scripted, often exaggerated or empty phrases developed to achieve maximum acceptance or...

Scapegoating (also, Blamecasting): The ancient fallacy that whenever something goes wrong there's always someone other than oneself to blame. Although sometimes this fallacy is a practical denial of randomness or chance itself, today it is more often a mere insurance-driven business decision ("I...

The Red Herring (also, Distraction): An irrelevant argument, attempting to mislead and distract an audience by bringing up an unrelated but emotionally loaded issue. E.g., "In regard to my several bankruptcies and recent indictment for corruption let’s be straight up about what’s really...

The Procrustean Fallacy (also, "Keeping up Standards," Standardization, Uniformity, Fordism). The modernist fallacy of falsely and inappropriately applying the norms and requirements of standardized manufacturing. quality control and rigid scheduling, or of military discipline to inherently...

The Pollyanna Principle (also, "The Projection Bias," "They're Just Like Us," "Singing 'Kumbaya.'"): A traditional, often tragic fallacy of ethos, that of automatically (and falsely) assuming that everyone else in any given place, time and circumstance had or has basically the same (positive)...

Paternalism: A serious fallacy of ethos, arbitrarily tut-tutting, dismissing or ignoring another's arguments or concerns as "childish" or "immature;" taking a condescending attitude of superiority toward opposing standpoints or toward opponents themselves. E.g., "Your argument against the war is...

Othering (also Otherizing, "They're Not Like Us," Stereotyping, Xenophobia, Racism, Prejudice): A badly corrupted, discriminatory argument from ethos where facts, arguments, experiences or objections are arbitrarily disregarded, ignored or put down without serious consideration because those...

The Non Sequitur: The deluded fallacy of offering evidence, reasons or conclusions that have no logical connection to the argument at hand (e.g. “The reason I flunked your course is because the U. S. government is now putting out purple five-dollar bills! Purple!”). (See also Red Herring.)...

The Narrative Fallacy (also, the Fable; the Poster Child) The ancient fallacy of persuasion by telling a "heartwarming" or horrifying story or fable, particularly to less-educated or uncritical audiences who are less likely to grasp purely logical arguments or general principles. E.g., Charles...

Moving the Goalposts (also, Changing the Rules; All's Fair in Love and War; The Nuclear Option; "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing"): A fallacy of logos, demanding certain proof or evidence, a certain degree of support or a certain number of votes to decide an issue, and then when...

Moral Licensing: The contemporary ethical fallacy that one's consistently moral life, good behavior or recent extreme suffering or sacrifice earns him/her the right to commit an immoral act without repercussions, consequences or punishment. E.g., "I've been good all year, so one bad won't...

Mala Fides (Arguing in Bad Faith; also Sophism): Using an argument that the arguer himself or herself knows is not valid. E.g., An unbeliever attacking believers by throwing verses from their own Holy Scriptures at them, or a lawyer arguing for the innocence of someone whom s/he knows full well...

The Law of Unintended Consequences (also, "Every Revolution Ends up Eating its own Young:" Grit; Resilience Doctrine): In this very dangerous, archly pessimistic postmodern fallacy the bogus "Law of Unintended Consequences," once a semi-humorous satirical corollary of "Murphy's Law," is elevated...

Infotainment (also Infortainment; Fake News; InfoWars); A very corrupt and dangerous modern media-driven fallacy that deliberately and knowingly stirs in facts, news, falsities and outright lies with entertainment, a mixture usually concocted for specific, base ideological and profit-making...

Heroes All (also, "Everybody's a Winner"): The contemporary fallacy that everyone is above average or extraordinary. A corrupted argument from pathos (not wanting anyone to lose or to feel bad). Thus, every member of the Armed Services, past or present, who serves honorably is a national hero...

Gaslighting: A recently-prominent, vicious fallacy of logic, denying or invalidating a person's own knowledge and experiences by deliberately twisting or distorting known facts, memories, scenes, events and evidence in order to disorient a vulnerable opponent and to make him or her doubt his/her...

Salacious Fallacy, falsely attracting attention to and thus potential agreement with one's argument by inappropriately sexualizing it, particularly connecting it to some form of sex that is perceived as deviant, perverted or prohibited (E.g., Arguing against Bill Clinton's presidential legacy by...

Essentializing: A fallacy of logos that proposes a person or thing “is what it is and that’s all that it is,” and at its core will always be the way it is right now (E.g., "All terrorists are monsters, and will still be terrorist monsters even if they live to be 100," or "'The poor you will...

Equivocation: The fallacy of deliberately failing to define one's terms, or knowingly and deliberately using words in a different sense than the one the audience will understand. (E.g., President Bill Clinton stating that he did not have sexual relations with "that woman," meaning no sexual...

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: A cognitive bias that leads people of limited skills or knowledge to mistakenly believe their abilities are greater than they actually are. (Thanks to Teaching Tolerance for this definition!) E.g., "I know Washington was the Father of His Country and never told a lie...