| abstract
| - A boxer steps into the ring and declares that today the crowd will watch as he pulverizes the reigning world champion. He then produces a straw dummy that looks a little like his supposed opponent, beats the hell out of it, and declares himself the victor. This is the strawman fallacy; a debater constructs a weakened or just plain unrecognizable form of an opponent's argument, and in defeating it acts like he has defeated the real argument. A straw character is a caricature of a person holding an opposing viewpoint, a character the author has set up in order to ridicule a particular viewpoint. A strawman can have pretty much any political or religious stance. Why bother addressing the real issues of, for example, firearms advocates, when you can instead portray them all as bearded, racist lunatics ranting about black helicopters and wanting to own their own nuclear warheads? And so it goes with other examples; capitalists literally worship the bottom line, liberals are all secret communists aiming to destroy morality, scientists shake their fist at God while plotting to surpass him, the religious are wide-eyed, superstitious madmen, feminists want to kill all men, and so on. This is not to say that such extremists don't actually exist, but the straw character presents extreme or minority views as the typical beliefs of a group rather than those of a tiny subset of it. A sub-type of straw character is the sounding board, a character who makes points on their side purely so a character the author agrees with can reply with devastating comebacks that prove the first character's foolishness. The straw character is left stumped by the author's obvious wisdom, and will struggle to reply or explode angrily to show how unreasonable they are. Characters of this type are extremely one-dimensional. Every aspect of them is geared towards advancing the views of the author. The presence of such characters is often jarring and sometimes offensive to people who actually hold the beliefs that are being misrepresented; in addition, strawmen are very ineffective tools to convert or convince people of opposing beliefs and tend to encourage Confirmation Bias. This is especially annoying when a normal member of the cast suddenly loses IQ points to deliver An Aesop. The American strawmen sometimes fall into one of these categories (see Political Stereotype):
* 1. Liberal. An aging hippie who refuses to believe his movement is dead, a Straw Feminist who loathes anything with a Y chromosome, a Malcolm Xerox who thinks Everything Is Racist, a self-righteous hipster (or Bourgeois Bohemian if they're older) who worships Michael Moore and is utterly convinced of his/her own moral superiority, or an insane environmentalist who will do anything to further his crazy agenda. Invokes First Amendment protection whenever people try to censor pornography, no matter how graphic and/or obscene, yet wishes to purge all references to violence from our media.
* 2. Conservative. A sneering, racist Good Ol' Boy who's seriously behind the times and is morbidly obese, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who only wants money, or a strict Fundamentalist/televangelist (bonus points if they're evangelical or Mormon). Takes the opposite stance to the Liberal regarding Censorship and the First Amendment: wants to protect depictions of violence, but calls for the banhammer on any work where people kiss a second too long or reveal even the slightest amount of skin. Listens obsessively to Rush Limbaugh.
* 3. Libertarian. An insane survivalist with a stockpile of guns and supplies who smokes copious amounts of marijuana, or a Corrupt Corporate Executive who obsessively follows Ayn Rand, a snotty rich WASP teenager who thinks he's a member of the intellectual elite after reading Heinlein and Rand, or an overzealous activist who spams Internet message boards with ads for Ron Paul. Worships either Ron Paul or Ayn Rand, one or the other, never both. Sub Tropes:
* Cruella to Animals
* Straw Fan
* Straw Feminist
* Straw Misogynist
* Malcolm Xerox
* Animal Wrongs Group
* Straw Loser See Strawman U for an entire university composed of straw characters or Fictional Political Party for what can amount to an entire party of strawmen. See also Fox News Liberal for varieties trotted out for or by the media. The strawman is a relative of the Windmill. While a strawman is a dumbed down version of a real enemy or threat, a windmill is not at all the threat it's believed to be - if it even exists in the first place. A person who honestly fights such windmills can be used as a Straw Loser, while a dishonest person who tricks others into fighting windmills typically is a Straw Hypocrite. Examples of Straw Character include:
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