It is Officially the Logical Fallacy of and for the postmodern generation Argumentum Ad Hominem. In our modern time stupidity is actually quite clever, being ill informed is praised, …whatever… is the new conclusion and attacking the person is the only form of Intellectual Mob rule and it is the Mobs only claim to reason…
Argumentum Ad Hominem is about a conducive to good discussion as a brick smashing through delciate mouth and crushing a wall of fragile white teeth.
Let us temper ourselves
Let wild dogs bark and exhaust themselves!
Let us talk openly…side to side…
p.s. Beware of the know-inothing-cretin disguised as Valid Logical Argument!
Sure. Nieztsche uses ‘attacking the person’ quite oepnly and quite intelligently. My point is that the masses of the modern personality avoid all form of debate and argument and logic and use only insults and attacks.
Perhaps evening calling what they discuss Argumentum Ad Hominem gives their rabbling too much credibility. I see this style of talking used more and more commonly amoung teenagers and young adults…here is a brief transcription fom a very bad conversation taken from youtube from a video of an Iraq Sniper Shooting a U.S. Soldier:
(Now of course I don’t expect a wild flash of intelligent prose from such a site or from a lot of the people who comment on this site, but if anything, it serves to demonstrate, in a wide sweeping general term, that general perspective taken by the average (american) youth and the youth in general. Attacking the person par excellence…super-moronic inferno)
maydayfire (6 days ago)
LOL good one!!!
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Pwndizzle (5 days ago)
people like maydayfire, exposersoftruth and anyone else that enjoys seeing an american or muslim die should be the ones getting the bullet in the head, theres a regular person behind those clothes which you dont understand and which is why this race will eventualy kill itself, sad… so fucking sad
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Kaarepimp (5 days ago)
MOtherfucker looser sniper asshole fuckneck
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sauffiyan (3 days ago)
this what freud said, state of denial and psychological defence mechanisme…well picture paint 1000 words,well, video painted your US donkeys ass a million humiliations…dat was a US soldiers ok…we are all not fools like u US pussy…
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orangevideo (3 days ago)
Are they using tracers as slugs? Target all mobile sniping platforms.
blow the suspect vans/guised trucks, etc off the road.
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Abdurahman1234567890 (2 days ago)
wowow
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SoldierT105 (1 day ago)
I can’t believe a sniper was using tracers. They are fucking retarded. I hope we (America) kills every last one of those little fucks. The world is better without them!!
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fx76 (1 day ago)
MASSLOR you a fuckin prick your the fuckin same smelly bastards you and your family should be shot be my pleasure to do it who the fuck are you to say its good your GOD doesnt even exist glad i beat the fuck out of your kind last week??many more to come
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fx76 (1 day ago)
shut the fuck up you fuckin week smelly retard your kind are all the same fuck of back to your country and stop begging of us now FUCK OFF
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fx76 (1 day ago)
get fucked you retard hope the same happens to your family while you watch fuckin loser oh one question?? why does your kind always smell???
This sort of conversation makes me fear and terrible for the state of present day education and human intelligence everywhere. Is this really the type of brains we churn out?
Yah right, they all just do as you say. ****ing retard…
No, I didn’t mean that, it was just an example of the horrable “quality” which most “arguments” base themselves upon.
If one had more of a “teacher” mentality, they would take time fully explaining all of the hows and whys, but that takes allot of time and skill, thus is the rare method?
This lowest form of convorsation on the face of the earth has only arisen in tandem with modern technologies and culture…if anything they expose, if it needed exposing, how watered down the generatiosn are becoming. Those sort of moronic conversation are being held through the western hemisphere.
Perhaps I am going over the top…it just appears…that coupled with our present day ‘short attention span’ and ‘attacking the person’ we have breed little more than rats. Highly intelligent stupid human rats who can’t tell their arse from their elbow.
With so much progress and comfort in the western hemisphere and these prime examples of attacking the person, it appears we are dumbing down the generations (Was it ever in doubt?).
Dumb dumb dumb
people are so dumb
you can hear them
splashing around in the dumbness all day long
Nietzsche does not use deductive reasoning. He uses evidentiary, “inductive” methods aimed not at proof of facts, but at the discovery of motives. His ad hominems are generally concerned not with “whats” but with “whys”. Ad hominems are relevant when the issue is actually the man. Philosophy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Logic does. All of philosophy is an attack on something. The politesse of the publish-or-perish crowd informs the rules. Great philosopher get to break them.
It’s also worth remembering that ad hominem is not just any insult to someone, it’s only applicable when an argument proposed by someone is rejected based, not on the grounds of the argument itself, but on some characteristic attributed to the proposer by the other party.
So right, siatd. That should be “conspiracy theorists are paranoid and delusional, and it is by the nature of those theories themselves that we know this.”
IMO, ad hominem is wrong if used because one cannot offer substantial ideas for good debate. All of us have personalities that come out in our arguments. Sometimes one type of personality may seem abrasive to another. Still, the best debates are characterized by mutual repect. Neitzsche’s dislike of Kant was due to his interpretation of Kantian ideas as stodgy, absolutist, anal retentive, reifying and ossifying. N’s ideas came from the his take on K’s ideas . Without respect for K’s ideas, N. would never have commented about them. N. had good counter arguments.
i agree with this point and your sentiments completely. I charge that the public schooling system(the evil cesspool that it has become) is the first place to look for the cause of oral basturdization.
by this i mean mental to verbal infection. swearing is a disease,which i have contracted, and i know of no cure. swearing seems to be for the weak. that or the very pissed.
I don’t think ad-hominem arguments are only so common in internet chatter. We’ve got a president today whose primary political impediments are his horrific speech skills, and a past president whose primary political impediments were his adulterous activities, which in fact nearly got him impeached. Do these things have anything, whatsoever, to do with policy decisions? The institutionalized concept of character debates in political campaigns is entirely ad-hominem, and so I think the original post is accurate.
Colinsign, do you have a proposed solution to this issue?
This is a good enough example to work with I guess.
Alright so, the ad hom.
You see the ad hom swings both ways. Where the ad hom really comes into play in my mind is through humor. Something which is overlooked is that the ad hom can do a lot of pragmatic work in a much more subtle way provided the audience is influenced by its design.
Faust, Phaedrus, and even though it doesn’t really work for him, Yopele, employ humour in the aforementioned conspiracy talks. Now, they know I don’t find it funny, and that from my point of view their insults do nothing to help their argument, but they still do it. The reason is to influence the audience; hence in their minds, for that instance, the audience is on their side. Not because of the quality of their argument, but the appeal of their character – for that instance.
I know you have all felt this, as this is a philosophy board and I’m sure in the run of trying to have a proper argument, some assclown has made a joke which erupted the room into laughter, ceasing any persuasion you had. Not because of your argument’s quality, but because they simply are not listening anymore.
Imp, you realize that I was writing about ad hominem in our political climate, as opposed to taking a partisan political position, don’t you? By my interpretation, you haven’t responded to my points, just gone onto tangents from my examples.
Old_Gobbo, humor isn’t the same as ad hominem. I see your comparison, in that it would be a logical fallacy to assume someone is correct because they are funny, or because they use rhetorical devices well, but cracking a joke isn’t the same as attacking the arguer (silly sounding word) instead of the argument.
I think it is if the joke focuses on the character of the person. My point was simply that under humor the ad hom is more cleverly hidden. The attack isn’t an attack in this case, not really; rather it entices the listener to side with the jokester in comparison, for that instance. It says nothing about the character of the other person, sure, and that’s the point – all the attention is on the other person so it doesn’t matter anyways.
Humor or malicious words, the argument is suspended in both cases.
