Fallacies are really cool. You can use them to help your argument have more 'pop' as it were.
After all, what an interesting way to shut down a dialogue you're no longer interested in being involved with by insulting the person rather than addressing the issue/topic at hand.
Much better to call someone a "douche bag" than to really get into the muck and mire involved in actual policy discussions.
The problem is that the use of fallacies does little to actually support your actual argument. Indeed, the fallacy, though great for advertising, is flawed in its logic or structure.
Another fallacy that I've seen used a lot recently (well...within the last hour actually) is the Associational Fallacy...
That one pretty much goes along the lines of
An association fallacy is an inductive formal fallacy of the type hasty generalization or red herring which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association. The two types are sometimes referred to as guilt by association and honor by association. Association fallacies are a special case of red herring, and can be based on an appeal to emotion.
In other words, if instead of discussing the topic of X with someone, I turned around and said "Well...you're supporting Y candidate, so obviously your ideas aren't worth the paper they've been scribbled on," I'd be engaging in a fallacious argument.
Why?
Well...syllogistically, I'd be wrong to assume that the person I was talking to didn't have any thoughts of his or her own and was just spouting Talking Points derived from the candidate's campaign.
A corollary to this would be assuming that because an assumed supporter (remember...no one knows you're a dog here on the intertubes) puts up a Hit Diary it's obvious that...
a. the campaign is divebombing
b. the campaign is involved
c. the campaign has ultimate control over everything that goes out in the candidate's name
d. the person doing the diary is actually connected to the campaign at all.
So here's my wee suggestion for when entering a candidate diary--
Carry a salt lick
You can get them at your local ag store...possibly even the local equestrian supply store. They are very handy...and once the primaries are over in a few months (2 months and 6 days for me), you might be able to give what's left over to a local family farmer. Or you can store it in the shed until we get to the General Election.
Thus far, I've been doing a fairly good job (as an undecided voter) keeping the posters/supporters/passionate partisans separate from the actual candidates. I know that they are individuals who are very intense about their particular candidates. And I'm fairly sure that most of their actions do not necessarily reflect the candidates that they support.
Oh...and let's be careful out there.