Nutpicking

[[File:Nuts on Spice Bazaar in Istanbul 01.jpg|thumb|right|165px|Nuts and seeds at an Egyptian bazaar]]
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{{cquote|If the best evidence of wackjobism you can find is a few anonymous nutballs commenting on a blog, then the particular brand of wackjobism you're complaining about must not be very widespread after all.|||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 picking|cherry picks]] a poor representative of a group to use as an ''[[ad hominem]]'' against them. For example, [[antifeminist|anti-feminists]] frequently paint people who support [[feminist|feminism]] as "[[feminazi]]s" [[Guilt by association|by highlighting examples of ridiculous or cringeworthy behavior from select individuals]], rather than critiquing points addressed in mainline feminist writings.<ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTDHwWVOKFI&list=PLEwFIOxtLWjoQjuxaYQp_-kuWxqd67G_3&index=8</ref>{{efn|This is such a frequent talking point within [[MRA]] circles, it has its own acronym: WBB (Women Behaving Badly).<ref>http://manboobz.com/2010/09/20/women-behaving-badly-meet-men-behaving-worse/</ref>}} 

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 {{wpl|portmanteau}} of "nut" and "nitpicking" coined by ''Mother Jones'' blogger Kevin Drum (and is thus sometimes called '''Kevin's Law''' or '''Drum's Law''').<ref>Drum's [http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_08/009318.php first] and [http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_08/009324.php second] post on naming nutpicking.</ref>

In scholarly circles, "nutpicking" is called the '''weak-man fallacy'''.<ref>[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10503-010-9199-y "Straw Men, Weak Men, and Hollow Men"] Aikin, Casey, 2010</ref>

==Basis==
Nutpicking combines elements of several other [[Fallacy|fallacies]]; it primarily relies on [[guilt by association]], as it seeks to [[Poisoning the well|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]] [[debate]]s 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!". One of the most egregious cases of nutpicking came when a [[Republican]] candidate for [[Delaware]]'s state legislature ran a television [[ad]] which nutpicked comments from a [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] blog called Raising Kaine.<ref>[http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/nutpicking-hits-the-big-time Nutpicking hits the big time], Talking Points Memo. September 22, 2007</ref>

An example of [[liberals]] committing this fallacy is when an unhinged [[racist]] appearing at a conservative conference was presented as evidence of its racist nature.<ref>http://twitchy.com/2013/03/15/liberals-quick-to-promote-white-separatist-troll-as-face-of-cpac/</ref> 

When the [[Tea Party]] found out about nutpicking, they immediately accused those who noted the racist elements of the Tea Party movement of nutpicking. That is, just because you can find (a whole lot of) racist depictions of "[[Obama citizenship denial|Kenya-born]]" [[Barack Obama|Barack HUSSEIN Obama]] on Tea Party signs at "protests", it's not representative of the movement in any way, which is '''not racist'''. Of course, this also ignores the fact that the Tea Partiers ran openly racist candidates like [[Carl Paladino]],<ref>[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/17/carl-paladinos-craziest-l_n_720430.html#s141428&title=Crossing_The_Line HuffPo: Crossing the Line on the Issue of Race]</ref> [[Tom Tancredo]],<ref>[http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/06/25/tancredo-to-speak-at-white-supremacist-conference/ Dispatches From the Culture Wars: Tancredo to speak at white supremacist conference]</ref> and [[Rich Iott|a guy who liked to dress up as a Nazi on weekends]].<ref>[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/why-is-this-gop-house-candidate-dressed-as-a-nazi/64319/ The Atlantic: Why Is This GOP House Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?]</ref>

[[TERF]]s often engage in nutpicking when talking about [[transgender]] people, particularly transgender women, so they can claim to have proved that protecting transgender people will lead to [[cisgender]] women [[Sex and gender in sport|losing at sports]] and/or being [[rape]]d ([[Transphobia and public restrooms|especially in bathrooms]]). One of their favourite examples is Karen White, who was placed in a women's [[prison]] before sexually assaulting inmates.<ref>https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/11/karen-white-how-manipulative-and-controlling-offender-attacked-again-transgender-prison</ref> They tend to ignore that protocols were not followed in this case, and that White would not have been in the prison if they had.

[[Anti-Zionism|Anti-Zionists]] and [[Zionism|Zionists]] both frequently engage in nutpicking. For example, anti-Zionists often take the quote "{{wpl|A land without a people for a people without a land||"}} as emblematic of the Zionist movement, when few Jewish Zionists ever said such a thing; it comes instead from Christian supporters of Zionism.<ref name="Alan Dowty 2001 p. 267">Alan Dowty, The Jewish State, A Century Later (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 267.</ref><ref name="Muir">Diana Muir, [http://www.meforum.org/article/1877 "A Land without a People for a People without a Land", ''Middle Eastern Quarterly'', Spring 2008, Vol. 15, No. 2]</ref><ref>[https://archive.org/details/landofisraelacco00keit_0/page/43 <!-- quote="a people without a country; even as their own land, as subsequently to be shown, is in a great measure a country without a people.". --> Alexander Keith, The Land of Israel According to the Covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob (Edinburgh: William Whyte and Co., 1843), p. 43 ]</ref>{{efn|Many Christian "supporters" of Zionism [[Antisemitism|do not actually approve of the existence of Judaism]]; they see the establishment of a total Israel, with [[Ethnic cleansing|zero traces of Palestine whatsoever]], as [[Millennialism|a necessary condition]] for [[Eschatology|the beginning of]] the [[Rapture]], and [[Schadenfreude|anticipate]] that Israel will get stomped into the dirt during (their [[Bigotry|warped]] interpretation of) the [[Second Coming]]. To [[Dominionism|these people]], [[My enemy's enemy|Zionism is only a means to the end of getting what ''they'' want]], and once they have it, the Jews can rot (in [[hell]]) as far as they're concerned. (The fact that [[Jesus Christ]] would ''not'' approve of treating anyone like shit for petty reasons such as honest and valid differences of opinion [[Self projection as god|is lost on them]].)}} Zionists, meanwhile, tend to take [[Hamas]] and Islamic [[Jihad]] (particularly the [[Genocide|"Israel and Jews must be obliterated"]] style of jihad) as though they express the only thing anti-Zionism can possibly represent.

==Internet==
In terms of Internet culture, another form of nutpicking occurs when people selectively pick out the most egregious, harrowing, [[hypocritical]], or downright indefensible statements made by self-identifying members of a particular group, and then paint the group as universally holding these views. These posts and quotations are typically taken from blogs and [[social media]], where anyone can anonymously or pseudonymously post virtually anything, regardless of how outrageous it may be.<ref group=note>Yes, this can and does result in [[Poe's Law]] being invoked on purpose [[Agent provocateur|to make certain groups and ideologies look worse than they actually are]].</ref>

It should go without saying that:

*All groups have their [[Extremism|extremists]], [[Fanaticism|fanatics]], [[fringe]] believers, and just plain [[Psychopath|psychopathic]]/[[Sociopath|sociopathic]] subscribers<ref group=note>It could even be argued that psychopaths and sociopaths like to latch on to causes (even [[Social justice|ostensibly]] [[Feminism|noble]] [[Rationalism|causes]]) as a way to hide their true selfish intentions and/or compile a quick list of "enemies" that they can "safely" abuse and oppress without {{wpl|Ostracism|becoming pariahs}} or getting outright imprisoned or executed — they don't necessarily support the agenda, they just use it as a crutch to justify behaving like [[Fun:Asshole|assholes]]. However, this argument is a borderline [[No True Scotsman]], and even if this argument is accepted, it would be foolish to assume that ''all'' psychotic members of a group are really just psychopaths or sociopaths trying to use the group as a cudgel and shield to support their own selfish pursuits without actually believing in the cause.</ref>
*[[Poe's law]] should always be a consideration (especially in subject matters prone to poorly labeled/badly executed "satire", and people reading them as genuine)
*The [[Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory]] still readily applies to sites like [[Tumblr]] and [[Reddit]].

==Selective video editing==
Nutpicking also tends to occur in videos that interview random people in public about current events, in which they are edited to select the most outrageous ones; for instance, a video suggesting that University of Washington students would vote for [[Hillary Clinton]] simply because she is a woman.<ref>Campus Reform, [http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6452 VIDEO: Students are 'Ready for Hillary' just because she's a woman] by Caleb Bonham</ref> Similarly, [[Mark Dice]] has created videos asserting that people are willing to sign a petition to repeal the [[First Amendment]].<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpHOaW99ST4 Obama Supporters Petition to Repeal the FIRST AMENDMENT. Seriously! Watch!]</ref> The only point of these videos is to give viewers a false sense of [[moral]] and intellectual superiority.<ref group=note>This has a penchant for happening even when these interview videos are ''not'' actively attempting to push an agenda, for the simple reason that watching people share [[Overton window|(conventionally-)sane mainstream opinions]] is [[Selective reporting|far less intriguing and attention-grabbing]] than witnessing the deranged ramblings of lunatics.</ref>

==Religion==
The [[Calvinist]] apologist [[James White]], founder of Alpha and Omega Ministries, is known to engage in nutpicking in a religious context. He once debated with [[Robert Sungenis]] on the relative merits of Calvinism vs. [[Catholicism]]. Given that Sungenis is a [[Holocaust denial|Holocaust-denying]] [[geocentrist]], this gave White the opportunity to present his own brand of hardline Calvinism as moderate and reasonable in comparison. It's probably no accident that he selected the fringy Sungenis, rather than a more mainstream Catholic figure, as his debate opponent. The reverse of this situation would be a mainstream Catholic pointing to the [[Westboro Baptist Church]] as representative of Calvinism.{{efn|Though the Westboro Baptist Church (or something like it) ''is'' admittedly the logical endpoint of [[Predestination|a worldview where only a small handful of humanity has any inherent value to their existence]].}}

White also engaged in an online debate with the even [[kook]]ier Catholic, [[Theodore Shoebat]], which once again enabled him to position himself as the reasonable party, since at least James White (unlike Shoebat) doesn't support burning hundreds of millions of people at the stake!

Inter-religious polemics very frequently involve nutpicking. For example, non-Muslims often point to [[ISIS]] or [[jihad]]ism as representative of [[Islam]]. Similarly, one can use {{wpl|thuggee|thuggees}} or {{wpl|Aghori|aghoris}} as examples of [[Hinduism]].

Debates between religious and [[atheist]] commentators often involve nutpicking by both sides. For example, [[Bill Nye]] chose as his debate partner the [[Young Earth creationism|Young Earther]] [[Ken Ham]] ([[Bill Nye debates Ken Ham]]), not an advocate of a more moderate view like [[theistic evolution]]. [[Creationists]] themselves [[List of fallacious creationist quotes|often point to]] [[fringe]] [[scientists]] or [[pseudoscientist]]s, who also happen to be atheists, as representative of mainstream [[secular]] science.

==DIY Nuts==

Can't find a nut that is willing to say the crazy thing you need? [[PIDOOMA|Invent them!]] "[[Anecdotal evidence|Offline, I encounter radical feminists that hate all men all the time]]. If you haven't, [[Argumentum ad cellarium|you clearly don't get out much.]]"

==See also==
*[[Cherrypicking]], similar to nutpicking but inverted
*[[Straw man]]
*[[Stereotype]]

==Notes==
{{reflist|group=note|2}}

==References==
{{reflist|2|80%}}

{{logfal}}

[[Category:Ad hominem]]
[[Category:Imprecision fallacies]]
[[Category:Neologisms]]
[[Category:Political terms]]

Categories: Ad hominem, Imprecision fallacies, Neologisms, Political terms