Here’s the exact pull-quote from Lanier’s essay I’m thinking of:

Can we say Wikileaks is doing anything beyond sterile information worship? Is it engaged in nonviolent activism?

We celebrate the masters of nonviolent activism, such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. All these figures displayed astounding courage, faced arrest, and suffered without hating their oppressors in order to demonstrate a common humanity. These remarkable people did not make “Crush the bastards” into their mantra.

This is literally a fallacious argument. It sets up a category — “nonviolent activism” — and then moves the yardstick, identifying nonviolent activism with civil disobedience in the model of Gandhi et al. If it isn’t civil disobedience, Lanier suggests, then it isn’t nonviolent activism; it’s just trolling. But that’s not true. Play with the definitions if you want, but I’d say that Wikileaks *is* nonviolent activism without being civil disobedience. (Wikileaks’ actions might inadvertently result in violence, but shit, so did Gandhi and King’s. Except in Gandhi’s and King’s cases, that was part of the point.)

The fallacy works rhetorically because it waves the Gandhi flag, just like the ad Hitlerem fallacies (usually version of the slippery slope) works because it raises the specter of Hitler. That’s the problem. The idea that if you are not doing what Gandhi et al did, or were supposed to have done (it’s usually a sanctified or otherwise misunderstood version of what happened), you are falling short or are otherwise illegitimate. That’s the Gandhi Principle.

Key point: The Ad Hitlerem arguments are used to put the actions of their opponents in a negative light. People that reference Gandhi, King, Mandala, et al are often explaining their motivations or inspiration behind their own actions and are taking ownership instead of placing a label on the actions of another. Maybe a small distinction, but I wouldn’t want these two arguments to be seen in the same negative light. Not that the Gandhi argument is always right, but the intention seems important.