eponymous laws often tend to function as thought-terminating cliches especially if taken to extremes. hanlon's razor is another one: malice is a very real thin

eponymous laws often tend to function as thought-terminating cliches especially if taken to extremes. hanlon's razor is another one: malice is a very real thing in the world, it's not at all the same thing as occam's "don't say the devil killed your crop when there's a perfectly good scientific explanation" razor. in this case it's actually "memetic mimicry" - one meme having successfuly adopted the "coloration" (form and tempo) of another for propagation, despite lacking the essential characteristic of the first. once these memes become established, people rarely question them, even when the ground circumstances have changed, or in cases in which they were never true at all. (tu quoque is another example of this - actually, if conduct is normalized by routine and broad acceptance of the practice, then collectively we have (apparently) decided it's acceptable. And in that case no, it's not a fallacy to point out that everyone is doing it. There is a kernel of truth that one wrong doesn't excuse another, but if we have accepted the practice then it's not really a wrong. And it is generally wrong to single out a particular participant while giving everyone else a pass, as this unequal enforcement of laws (or norms) easily becomes a tool of oppression and bias. This becomes the classic "everyone smokes weed, but only black people get arrested for it".)