Administrators and judges viligantly look for cause to close a case to get it off their desk. One of the very common tactics is to cherry pick a single claim or complaint out of a list of them, attack that one claim, and then close the whole file without addressing the other issues. It’s rampant. I’ve seen this strategy for avoiding work at all levels of governance, from first line admins all the way up to judges.
Another similar tactic:
You claim X and the case handler closes it saying the infringing agency did not do Y. IOW, they attack a strawman, which is a well known fallacy.
Or so I thought. As I was trying to work out what the first case might be called (attacking the weakest point of many and using that as a basis to close a case), I found this:
www.changingminds.org/disciplines/…/strawman.htm
WTF… not my understanding. I understand a strawman to be that of attacking a completely fabricated argument that is falsely presented as the opponent’s. After more thought, it does seem like a strawman variety in the sense that a collection of arguments is being wholly misrepresented as just one of the parts. But ok, strawman is a just a layman’s term anyway.
Lawyers must have some more appropriate verbiage/nomenclature for the situation of treating all claims as the weakest claim. Any insight?