- *Red herring / changing the subject.* The claim being discussed was that the CIA’s use of a fake vaccination program contributed to vaccine distrust in Pakistan. The response is essentially, “Pakistan shouldn’t have been harboring Bin Laden; whatever consequences followed were worth it.” That does not rebut the causal claim about vaccination distrust; it changes the question from “did this action damage trust?” to “was getting Bin Laden morally worth the cost?”
- *Fallacy of division / collective guilt.* “Pakistan” as a state allegedly harboring Bin Laden gets silently converted into responsibility belonging to roughly 260 million individual Pakistanis. The actions or failures of a government do not automatically transfer to every member of its population. That is exactly the problem the reply “blaming the ~260M citizens for the actions of Pakistani government” identifies.
- *Tu quoque / whataboutism.* When challenged on blaming Pakistani civilians, the response becomes, in effect, “people blame Americans for Trump too.” Even if people do unfairly blame Americans collectively, that would not establish that collective blame of Pakistanis is justified. It substitutes another allegedly similar wrongdoing for a defense of the original claim.
- *False dilemma.* “People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is.” Those are plainly not the only possibilities. Political responsibility can vary enormously according to voting rights, repression, electoral competitiveness, access to information, individual participation, age, etc. The binary “everyone or nobody” erases all of those degrees.
- *False equivalence.* The argument treats an American voter in a relatively open electoral system and an ordinary citizen living under a much more constrained political system as having essentially the same responsibility for state policy. The later reply directly points out the relevant differences—political freedom, literacy, schooling, and meaningful electoral choice. You don’t have to agree with every factual claim in that reply to see why those variables make the original analogy logically incomplete.
- *Straw man + loaded false dichotomy.* “Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else… I’ll happily take you admitting we’re the best.” Nobody needs to claim Americans are inherently “smarter and better” in order to argue that Americans may have greater access to education, information, political power, or institutional protections. He replaces the opponent’s actual position with a much more ridiculous one and then invites them to defend it.
There’s another especially clean straw man a few comments later. Someone says that even being able to criticize governments openly reflects a degree of privilege and mentions widespread poverty in Pakistan. The answer becomes “being poor doesn’t make one stupid or uneducated.” But the original claim wasn’t “poor people are stupid”; it was about constraints on access, power, and political participation. He answers a more insulting proposition that nobody made.
There’s also some *equivocation around the word “responsible.”* He moves between at least three different meanings without separating them: having some causal influence over a government, having a civic duty to oppose bad policy, and deserving moral blame for what that government does. “People are responsible for the governments they have” sounds plausible under one meaning and then gets used to justify the much stronger claim that civilians deserve the consequences of state behavior. That slide is doing a lot of argumentative work.
You can see the same general pattern elsewhere. For example, when someone presents declining Treasury purchases as evidence for reserve-currency decoupling, he says that before making an argument about US interest rates/debt, they have to “resolve it for the UK, Italy, France, and others.” That is another relevance shift: problems or counterexamples involving other countries do not have to be “resolved” before the US-specific claim can be evaluated.
So if I were reducing his recurring argumentative style to the most defensible labels, I’d say: *false equivalence, tu quoque/whataboutism, straw man, false dilemma, red herring, collective-guilt/fallacy-of-division, and equivocation over key terms such as “responsibility.”* Those are much stronger and more precise than just calling it “bad faith.”