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Noah -> RE: Why are conservatives happier than liberals? (11/14/2006 12:35:42 AM)
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ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
Incorrect.
First, the "public figure" issue that you do not understand:
Public figure: a term erm applied in the context of defamation actions (libel and slander) as well as invasion of privacy. A public figure (such as a politician, celebrity, or business leader) cannot base a lawsuit on incorrect harmful statements unless there is proof that the writer or publisher intentionally defamed the person with malice. The burden of proof is higher in the case of a public figure.
What this means is that you can get away with calling a public figure all kinds of names, making all kinds of accusations. A private citizen, not in the public's eye and attention, has a much higher level of protection.
I am not a public figure. Call Bush and your favorite (or unfavorite) politican whatever you wish. Do not call me gratitious names, please.
So if the current laws regarding defamation were different, the rightness or wrongness of statements made against you would be different too?
I guess that's a difference between us. When I evaluate the rightness or wrongness of an action the analysis begins and ends with no reference to what some particular set of laws may say. Once I've determined whether an action is right or wrong I'm interested in the law for prudential reasons. The law itself does not determine morality for me. Laws at the best can reflect rightness. They can not establish it.
... unless you're down with a certain retrograde theological ethic common to the most radical of Islamists as well as religious fundamentalists of several other stripes. See Hourani's book on the ethics of 'Abd Al-Jabbar if you'd like a more in depth explanation.
A non-fundamentalist who still lets the law decide for him what is morally right and wrong would do well to get some counselling on locus of control issues, in my view.
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Second, your understanding of ad hominem:
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Ad hominem: An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin, literally argument against the person), personal attack or you-too argument, involves replying to an argument or assertion by attacking the person presenting the argument or assertion rather than the argument itself. It is a logical fallacy.
Congratulations on finding such an authoritative source.
And please re-read your snip which despite being a cobbled-up, muddy definition probbaly contributed by some tyro manages to include the key fact. An ad hominem is a (informal)logical fallacy.
Insulting you is not a logical fallacy.
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I think what philosophy did quite well fits this category. To recap:
1. philosophy insinuated in his post 60 that my pointing out that LaM original post was "facile and patronizing" was, in itself "facile and patronizing".
2. I replied to him in my post 67 and asked him:
Back to the original reason I posted to LaM in the first place ... do you not think his original comment was both facile and patronizing?
3. In philosophy's post 94, he replies:
...irrelevant, the point i was making is that you are a hypocrite......quite happy to accuse others of sins you have no trouble committing.
It seems quite clear that philosophy not only did not answer my question (address my argument), he is attempting to discount my declaration that LaM's post was "facile and patronizing" by saying it was immaterial, because I'm a "hypocrite".
This is a classic example of an ad hominem logical fallacy, which IS a personal attack to avoid the argument i.e. my logic is incorrect or immaterial because I'm a "hypocrite".
"...classic example..."! You kill me.
"... which IS a personal attack to avoid the argument..."
It is crucially NOT a personal attack to AVOID the argument. It employs a personal attack to DISQUALIFY the argument. You STILL don't know what ad hominem means! This is getting funny.
Dear God in heaven, man, you couldn't have documented your error better if you tried. Thank you.
The chain of reasoning you ascribe to philosophy is shown by your snips not to be a chain of reasoning at all, much less one Philosophy was trying to establish. Please do notice that he said: "irrelevant." That is to say that the straw man case you were trying to hold up in place of the issue he was raising ... was not the issue he was raising.
Philosophy at no point took any stance pro or con whether LAM's work was "facile and patronizing." He simply declined to ever enter that disputation. That same disputation which you accuse him not only of entering but of entering and speaking fallaciously in. He was staying out of that to continue to address the prior issue of your hypocrisy.
I actually believe that until reading this post you may have had no idea what Philosophy was actually getting at, except insofar you note that he quite properly declined to address your beside-the-point argument.
Not that Philosophy didn't make himself more than adequately clear.
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Again: a personal attack ... involves replying to an argument or assertion by attacking the person presenting the argument or assertion rather than the argument itself
Can your thinking really be this muddled? I stand here agog. Don't you see the circular definition which you have... well I won't even say "smuggled in" to the discussion since it was such a baldly hamfisted failure to establish anything logically.
You mine from the web some relatively unclear statement of the definition of Ad hominem, and present it. Good enough. Then, several lines later you present it again but this time as a definition of "Personal Attack".
The substitution would be illicit and dishonest even if it weren't made absurd by the circular definition which results.
Do you think we're all blind or drunk? Or can you actually not see what you're doing? This post of yours hardly even rises to the level of argumentation at all. It is slather-assed irresponsible rhetoric disguised as argumentation
As I carefully outlined previously, an ad hominem argument can employ an insult instrumentally in its attack on the reliability of an argument. But we bring in the term ad hominem not to name the insult, but to name a particular logical fallacy in which insults can be instrumental. The insult is the knife. The stabbing is the ad hominem.
If you can't appreciate the import of this sort of distinction you shouldn't be arguing at the grownups' table.
But even if you hadn't gotten that all exactly wrong, please attend to this: Philosophy--contrary to your bolluxed-up analysis, never said anything which cashes out as: "Your claim should be seen as false because you are a hypocrite (eliptical for "... and hypocrites can't be trusted.")
... as you duplicitously (or dimly?) credit him.
He in effect called you a hypocrite once. You missed his point or tried to obfuscate it with a tangential, mixed-up rejoinder. Then he calmly said, in effect: "That is all irrelevant to whether you are a hypocrite, which you are."
You asked for evidence. He chose not to provide it. Those are both fair moves.
K Y, nothing is more familiar on these boards the your propensity, shared with missdeathbyhairspray, to take some careless stab at someone or something which, when push comes to shove, you can't back up. Sometimes you are called on it by someone who does a decent job at the calling. In those cases you typically back and fill and hem and haw and more or less disclaim your original intent, scrambling to present some revisionist version of a meaning which was plain as day to start with. This, one might say, can be seen as the unifying element in your posting style.
Given that this is so I don't blame Philosophy for not enumerating instances of hypocrisy. Will you ask for cases in which birds flew?
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Therefore it was both a "personal attack" and further a personal attack as part of an "ad hominem" logical fallacy.
Seems pretty plain to me.
And here we see the signature "Squirm und Weasal" move for which you are so well known. The one which in particular cements your place in the popular consciousness here as a hypocrite. You began by calling the attack on you an ad hominem. I taught you that an ad hominem is a logical fallacy which involves what could be called a personal attack but involves it only instrumentally.
Now in this last snippet of yours, without admitting how fucked up your thinking was to start with, and indeed in the context of an attempt to defend the fucked-up thinking, you back away from your original position and try to inhabit the one which was used to demonstrate your error, and to claim it as your own.
That is to say that now you are suddenly claiming that what you meant all along was that that the attack on you was part of an ad hominem rather than saying that it was an ad hominem. We are back to the difference between a knife and a stabbing. It is not a trivial difference. It is a crucial difference.
Before, you were saying one thing. Now, you are saying something mutually exclusive of that thing. Furthermore you are (fatuously) using the mutually exclusive second claim in the context of a defense of the first claim.
Your reasoning manages to be both blatantly and intricately, fatally flawed.
The result? As so often happens, your weaselly backing and filling leaves you no better situated than you were before this latest bout of intellectual legerdemain. But then you seem to do it all almost reflexively anyway. Do you not care? I just don't know what to think.
Maybe there are people who read your pretty talk, replete with citations, and sort of guess that you might be right 'cause you say you're right so good. Is that the pinnacle of your ambition in a discussion here?
Yeah you talk pretty. Sometimes this indicates a bright person. I just don't know what to conclude in your case. Are you really that dull-witted but somehow able to talk pretty? If so your crap argumentation is one sort of failing.
If you are indeed as bright as your grammar and syntax (I would have included "vocabulary" until you botched ad hominem) would suggest, on the other hand, one is tempted toward the conclusion that you are a kind of bright person with few or no intellectual scruples.
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