Nutpicking
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“”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.
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In other words, a few crazy people in a movement/organisation are not enough to suggest that the entire movement is psychotic.
[edit] Applications
The practice of nutpicking is usually 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!" For liberals, for example, an unhinged racist appearing at a conservative conference is proof of the nature of the conference in general.[2]
The most common nutpicking tactic by conservatives is probably trolling through Daily Kos comments or some Truther site and pulling up references to "Bushhitler." When the Tea Party found out about nutpicking, they immediately accused those who noted the racist elements of the Teabagger movement as nutpicking. That is, just because you can find a (whole lot) of racist depictions of "Kenya-born" 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 Teabaggers ran openly racist candidates like Carl Paladino and Tom Tancredo, the Paul family (who have made... interesting comments about the Civil Rights Act) as well as a guy who liked to dress up as a Nazi on weekends.[3][4][5]
One of the most egregious cases of nutpicking came when a Republican candidate for state legislature in Delaware ran a television ad nutpicking comments on a Democratic blog called Raising Kaine.[6]
Nutpicking is also one tactic used by bigots, where it takes the form of publicizing the bad behavior of individuals within their targeted group. One example is when men's rights activists share stories of female criminals as some kind of "proof" that women are evil[7]. This often devolves into No True Scotsman when they try to dismiss counter-examples of their group behaving badly to show that race, gender, sexuality, etc. is not the sole determiner of anybody's behavior [8]
In terms of Internet culture, another form of nutpicking occurs when people selectively pick out the most egregious, harrowing, hypocritical, or downright silly examples of Internet posts and statements made by self-identifying members of a group, and then paint said group as universally holding said egregious, harrowing, hypocritical, or downright silly views. Usually, these posts and quotations are from websites and social media where anyone can post nearly anything regardless of how egregious, harrowing, hypocritical, or downright silly they are. It should go without saying that all groups have their extremists, and the GIFT theory[9] still quite readily applies in the more anonymous forms of social media (such as Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, comment sections, etc.).
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Drum's first and second post on naming nutpicking.
- ↑ http://twitchy.com/2013/03/15/liberals-quick-to-promote-white-separatist-troll-as-face-of-cpac/
- ↑ HuffPo: Crossing the Line on the Issue of Race
- ↑ Dispatches From the Culture Wars: Tancredo to speak at white supremest conference
- ↑ The Atlantic: Why Is This GOP House Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?
- ↑ Nutpicking hits the big time, Talking Points Memo. September 22, 2007
- ↑ This is such a frequent talking point within MRA circles, it has its own acronym: WBB (Women Behaving Badly).
- ↑ It should go without saying that nearly all feminists fight for equality before the law[wp] for both genders in both criminal and civil matters. It should, but this is the Internet.
- ↑ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19