Perverted Analogy Fallacy: look out for it.

So a person might make a claim like, "Uh, taxation is just because those being taxed have given, uh, implicit consent by continuing to live in a territory which is subject to the tax."

Um, and you'd like to get them to examine whether or not this idea of implicit consent really holds water.

And so you might ask them, "So, if I'm living in a village and the mafia come in and demand that I pay them, uh, protection money, uh, is that demand justified? Is the implicit consent I'm apparently granting by not leaving the territory, uh, in play here too? And if not, why not?"

Um, so I think it's obvious then that this kind of reply is, uh, designed to, uh, invite examination of the validity of, um, the notion of implicit consent in this case.

Um, but what might happen is that the reply that follows, um, sounds something like, um, something like this: "That's ridiculous! It's a completely fake analogy or false analogy to compare a de a democratically elected government to the mafia. Uh, they're two worlds apart."

So, did you see what, uh, what happened there?

Um, person A makes an analogy that's relevant to the subject in a limited way, like the scope of the analogy is limited, uh. But person B then complains that the analogy is not, uh, perfectly equivalent to, to the subject being discussed.

So I've come across this quite often in online discussions, and I've come across it often enough to think that this must be a fallacy that has earned, um, its own name.

In the end, I found a blog, uh, which I'll link to in the sidebar, uh, which dubs this, uh, this problem as the perverted analogy fallacy.

The perverted analogy fallacy is a form of, uh, straw man. Your opponent misconstrues your analogy as being far broader in scope than was intended, and the result is often that the person committing the fallacy avoids having to address, uh, the implications of the analogy or what the analogy demonstrates.

In the example I've used in this video, the analogy demonstrates that if we deny the legitimacy of a mafia extracting protection money, then we also deny, in fact, the legitimacy of the idea of the implicit contract as consented to by a person's continued, uh, residence in a particular territory.

So the name is the perverted analogy fallacy, and it might be useful to, uh, to keep that term in mind because it's a, a handy way to cut short these tiresome distractions, basically.