—Kevin Drum
Nutpicking is the fallacious tactic of picking out and showcasing the nuttiest member(s) of a group as the best representative(s) of that group — hence, "picking the nut".
This fallacy is committed when an arguer cherry picks a poor representative of a group to use as an ad hominem against them. For example, anti-feminists frequently paint people who support feminism as "feminazis" by highlighting examples of ridiculous or cringeworthy behavior from select individuals, rather than critiquing points addressed in mainline feminist writings.
In other words: every movement has crazies, but not every movement is crazy. The proper questions are: "Does this movement promote crazies?" and "Does this movement have proportionately more crazies?"
The word is, cleverly, both a variation on the word "cherry picking" and a portmanteau of "nut" and "nitpicking" coined by Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum (and is thus sometimes called Kevin's Law or Drum's Law).
In scholarly circles, "nutpicking" is called the weak-man fallacy. (...)
Basis
Nutpicking combines elements of several other fallacies; it primarily relies on guilt by association, as it seeks to tarnish a group's reputation by associating it with what the "nut" is saying or doing, knowing that their statements or actions are generally considered to be unacceptable, if not outright reprehensible. Secondly, it is a type of ad hominem, as it attacks an opponent's character (via the negative association), rather than countering the opponent's actual views or arguments.
The advent of the Internet (especially in conjunction with Sturgeon's Law) has made nutpicking far easier due to the massive expansion of recorded, publicly available and searchable material. Similar to Skarka's Law, it's practically always possible to find some random whackjob whose opinions can be associated with your opponent's school of thought, and it's certainly much easier than it would have been in ancient Greece.
Politics
The practice of nutpicking is employed most frequently in political debates as a method of invoking a false equivalence or tu quoque, where one side sifts through the blogs of people "on the other side" to hold up a nutty comment to say "You guys do it too!".
Nutpicking combines elements of several other fallacies; it primarily relies on guilt by association, as it seeks to tarnish a group's reputation by associating it with what the "nut" is saying or doing, knowing that their statements or actions are generally considered to be unacceptable, if not outright reprehensible. Secondly, it is a type of ad hominem, as it attacks an opponent's character (via the negative association), rather than countering the opponent's actual views or arguments.
The advent of the Internet (especially in conjunction with Sturgeon's Law) has made nutpicking far easier due to the massive expansion of recorded, publicly available and searchable material. Similar to Skarka's Law, it's practically always possible to find some random whackjob whose opinions can be associated with your opponent's school of thought, and it's certainly much easier than it would have been in ancient Greece.
Politics
The practice of nutpicking is employed most frequently in political debates as a method of invoking a false equivalence or tu quoque, where one side sifts through the blogs of people "on the other side" to hold up a nutty comment to say "You guys do it too!".
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[ed. Hadn't heard this one before. Certainly widespread.]
