I'm hereby giving a concept a name: the chimera straw-man.
Whether or not anyone's beaten me to this, I want this mental tool out there.
It's a name for a kind of fallacy I see widely used on the internet, in comments and memes. The chimera straw-man appears when people stitch together beliefs and statements of separate individuals, or groups that don't necessarily overlap, and make a single ridiculous statement, supposedly to represent their whole. It's done to create an apparent but misleading contradiction in word, deed, or worldview, which is itself already a well known fallacy known as the straw-man. The targeted person or group may well feel misrepresented, for good reason.
The reason I think it's worth defining is that our discourse suffers when we choose to stop seeing and stop thinking, when we ditch our efforts to understand someone or something and turn to a stereotype. That blocks our growth and our compassion. It also undermines our own belief system, because we're building it out of cheap, brittle materials. That means it breaks when you need to base anything important on it.
As per the fallacy-fallacy, the use of a fallacy doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong or invalid in your thesis idea. It just means you got there in a troublesome way that's left room for fusion with other errors.
So please, listen a bit further to make sure you understand what someone stands for. Resist the urge for such stereotypes. There are people who will listen to a thoughtful analysis that points out fallacies without incriminating them wholesale. Wise people grow from that.
Examples welcome, for educational purposes. Per above, they do not constitute dismissal or endorsement of their represented view.
