Green should disallow GINA

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Ashenden [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I love that when people disagree with a change they take it to the absolute extreme via things like resolution and internet speed to try and make it sound dumb.

Is there a name for that kind of argument?

Originally Posted by Izmael [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
is the closest I can think of.

I believe this is correct. In the more general sense you could say that someone making such an argument is making a "straw man" argument, but the specific kind of straw man would be one based on Reductio ad absurdum.

And before anyone tries to argue, I'm not trying to say that it never makes sense to use extremes in a debate. Of course that can be a valid rhetorical technique, sometimes, ie. when:

Originally Posted by https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

it builds on assertions which are actually present in the argument it is deconstructing, and not when it misrepresents them as a straw man. For example, any creationist argument that takes the form of "if evolution were real, we'd see fish turning into monkeys and monkeys turning into people all the time" only serves to ridicule itself, since it mischaracterises the theory of evolution to an extreme degree.