Flanaman

a flanaman is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. to “attack a flanaman” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the “flanaman”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
the flanaman man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument:

person a has position x.
person b disregards certain key points of x and instead presents the superficially similar position y. thus, y is a resulting distorted version of x and can be set up in several ways, including:

presenting a misrepresentation of the opponent’s position.

quoting an opponent’s words out of context — i.e. choosing quotations that misrepresent the opponent’s actual intentions.

presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, then refuting that person’s arguments — thus giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position itself) has been defeated.

inventing a fict-tious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.

oversimplifying an opponent’s argument, then attacking this oversimplified version.

person b attacks position y, concluding that x is false/incorrect/flawed.

this sort of “reasoning” is fallacious, because attacking a distorted version of a position fails to const-tute an attack on the actual position.