Argument Traps #1

Description of Straw Man

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person 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:

Person A has position X.

Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).

Person B attacks position Y.

Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.<

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a
distorted version of a position simply 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 university 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."

"Senator Jones says that we should not fund the attack
submarine program. I disagree entirely. I can't understand why he wants
to leave us defenseless like that."

Bill and Jill are arguing about cleaning out their closets:
Jill: "We should clean out the closets. They are getting a bit messy."
Bill: "Why, we just went through those closets last year. Do we have to clean them out everyday?"
Jill: "I never said anything about cleaning them out every day. You just want too keep all your junk forever, which is just ridiculous."