Wondergirl
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A red herring fallacy.
Thank-you, Alison, I agree!
Though I confess, I had to google your term, too late at night for my faculties, lol.
A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.
- Topic A is under discussion.
- Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
- Topic A is abandoned.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html