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No no, I mean the *other* sort of fault. (ho ho ho)

An argumentative fallacy

A class of reasoning I’ve observed in heated arguments between irritable people:

Person A does something that person B doesn’t like. Person B will commonly first remark something like “What’s this mess, did *you* do this?”, before going to say something like “This mess is all *your* fault”. This leads, logically enough to them saying “It’s all *your* fault”.

Now a piece of magic occurs, and the emphasis changes, resulting in “It’s *all* your fault”. They will repeat this again, using it as one might when saying “It’s raining”, so: “It’s *ALL* your fault”. This inevitably leads them to defensive conclusions of the form of “I’ve *never* done anything wrong”, with the intended scope being absolute and universality. There is a certain ingenuity involved in this sort of reasoning, I’m sure you’ll agree.