A field guide to the ways reasoning breaks
Attacks on the source
Also called Playing the Nazi card
Treating a view as refuted because a notorious figure or regime shared it.
A tyrant was a vegetarian, so vegetarianism is suspect.
Point out that villains also breathed air. Shared trait is not shared reasoning.
Coined by political philosopher Leo Strauss in 1953, playing on 'reductio ad absurdum'. His point: a view is not refuted by naming a monster who agreed with it. The coinage is a joke with teeth — the further the comparison drifts from the actual reasoning, the more it is decoration posing as refutation.
A zoning proposal to reduce traffic is dismissed at the town meeting because 'authoritarian regimes loved manipulating traffic flow too.'
A boss's proposal for a daily standup is shot down in a message thread with: 'Dictators love morning roll calls.'
A school uniform policy is mocked on social media with a photo of a historical tyrant in a pressed shirt and the caption 'he liked order too.'
A suggestion to add bicycle lanes to a main road is answered with 'you know who else redesigned the roads,' and the discussion ends there.