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Notes -
So there's a difference here between being 'not really' X, and being an unrepresentative example of X.
I think most people are not really aware of this difference on a level where they could talk about it coherently.
But it's very very often true that, when some member of a group has been shown in the public eye to be bad, with an implication that this demonstrates how members of that group are bad generally or how this group is bad for society, that this individual has been adversarially chosen and is in fact not representative of their group.
Think about brutal and criminal police held up as examples of ACAB and justifications for Defund. It would be entirely sensible to argue that these are not representative examples and don't justify the level of hostility towards the larger group that they are being used to engender.
Of course, with police, defenders don't have the option of claiming they're not 'real' police, because there is a central authoritative agency which objectively determines that fact (eg, they have a badge).
But in cases where there is no such objective metric and claims of being 'not a real X' are in fact possible and sensible, it's not surprising to me that people fall into this rhetoric when trying to express the intuition that this attempt to tar a group with a bad individual is unfair and dishonest.
It's not good rhetoric, but most people have no training in rhetoric and are bad at it; you will always be able to find examples of someone saying something stupid online.
My point is I think it's a bad attempt at conveying a good and true logical point about what is happening. And it's worth engaging with the point instead of the rhetoric where possible.
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