The BBC’s QI program raised a quite interesting example of a straw man argument.

We tend to associate voodoo dolls with sticking pins into effigies of people in order to cause them pain. This is a mistake. Voodoo dolls, far from being used to torture people at a distance, are used to channel healing energy to them.

Apparently it’s meant to be a good thing to make a model of someone and insert pins into it at strategic points.

The malicious version of the practice comes not from Voodoo but from European Witchcraft. Witches would use poppets, dolls made to represent a person, in the way now associated with Voodoo.

According to QI, the misunderstanding of Voodoo dates back to Christians misrepresenting the religion in order to discredit it. With some of the less savoury elements of European witchcraft grafted on to Voodoo, it was easy to criticise this distortion of it.

However, the criticisms would have had little relevance to the real Voodoo, making this attack an example of the straw man fallacy.