Not sure what to call this little rhetorical manoeuvre, but here’s an example of it - the polemical target is Terry Eagleton:
"The only conception he has of "questioning the foundations of the western way of life" is his own set of political opinions." [My italics]
It’s as if Eagleton’s ‘opinions’ are just some personal hobby-horse or idiosyncrasy*, the actual content of which is irrelevant. If someone’s ‘politics’ are marked by (say) a concern for social justice and democratic accountability, then he opposes a tyranny not because its existence ‘happens’ to offend ‘his own’ opinions but because of its injustice and unaccountability. I put ‘his own’ in scare quotes because these politics will in most cases be hardly just ‘his’ – they will be universal or certainly non-personal values that he believes in. If someone advocates torture, her ‘opinion’ is certainly different from my own, but I oppose it because of a commitment to certain universal values. Johaan Hari pulled a similar stunt some time ago, pretending that I was simply unable to tolerate a (ie any) different opinion. Of course, I was intolerant of his piece not because it was ‘different’ but because it was demonstrable nonsense. In any case, how can you disagree with someone who’s opinions are NOT different from your own?? The notion is trivially nonsensical.
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