Even worse, perhaps, is the Twitter version, which begins like this: “Shorter David Brooks,” or “Shorter Pope Francis,” or whomever the object of scrutiny is, followed by a colon and then an absurdly reductive account, not of what the person actually said but of what the tweeter is absolutely confident that the person meant. This kind of thing is closely related to the building of a straw man. The straw man is an evidently stupid argument that no one actually holds: refuting the ridiculous straw-man argument is easier than refuting the argument that someone actually made, so up in flames goes
...more
