the IDIOT

the now regular blind hypocrisy from the RP rah-rah horde lew let take over the LRC blog:

Union-Leader taunts Ron Paul supporters

Posted by Tex MacRae at October 5, 2007 02:23 PM

Another jerk. What is it with these people? Name-calling and taunting, how professional. Maybe he’s angling for a job on Faux News as a debate moderator.

did the devil take hold of dimwit macrae’s hands and force him to call drew cline a jerk? what sort of license is that where you can, straight faced, call a guy a jerk in one line, then one away decry name-calling as un “professional” (whatever “professional” means there, given that most of the fucks using it in that form are simply trying to imbue purely a “not acceptable to me” claim with an air of external authority or agreement)?

and again, some intellectually deficient clod brings up name-calling, the accusation of which — in most cases — is simply fallacious ad hominem under froo-froo cover of not being so soiled. well, bad news for tex and the other pretenders to logical skill: often when someone points to name calling as logically unacceptable in an argument, the only party employing fallacious ad hominem is the accuser. funny how that works. beautiful.

pull up your chairs, “ad hominem” trendy quacks; i’ll explain this slohhhhhwly for ya:

assume a logically valid argument — or even the mere attempt at one. for example,

all dogs own skyscrapers.
some skyscraper owners are ill.
therefore, some dogs are ill.

valid argument? of course not. however, some people are too stupid to see that. assume such a dumbass instead is presented with this argument:

all dogs own skyscrapers, dipshit.
some skyscraper owners are ill, as you’ve already acknowledged, fucking homo retard bastard.
therefore, unbelievably cockeyed assgrabbing dickhead, some dogs are ill.

“aha!” shouts the dumbass. “now you’ve lost all credibility, since you’re a name caller. i win!”

here i’ve intentionally made my case cloudy by basing it on invalid argument. but that merely shows the strength of the case, since it transitions from mildly persuasive to impervious if the “clean” version is valid, for the “dirtying” of the clean version cannot affect the validity of the underlying logic — that thing “ad hominem” flingers presume to attack while running away at full speed. in the exchange above between the foul-mouthed syllogism screwer and the “i won” dipshit, the dipshit is the only one offering no argument other than pointing out irrelevant characteristics of the arguer — in this case his penchant for peppering his argument with insults. while both are employing ad hominem (most, sadly, do not recognize this, instead giving a pass to the one who avoids the more obvious version of it), it is the “i won” dipshit whose ad hominem is “more fallacious”, or at least less hypocritical intentionally (assuming foulmouther’s screwing of the syllogism was unintentional, which raises a crazy aspect of fallacy assessment not addressed in this post).

now, consider a version pair i won’t bore you with, where the syllogism of the foul-mouthed arguer was instead valid. in that case he’s committed no fallacy at all, even with the ad hominem (yes, dullards, there is such a thing as non-fallacious ad hominem), while the “i won” jackass is committing the very fallacy he’s falsely asserting lost the argument for mr. foulmouth.

returning to dipshit macrae, not only has he offered no refutation in his post, in the space of a brief paragraph he committed the same action he dully implies he’s above.

in all cases of argument criticism, name-calling is irrelevant. read that again if you missed it. the key to detecting fallacious ad hominem is the absence of valid argument, posed as argument — not the mere presence of insults or other personal notations. if one is to criticize the argument, the correct target is that part which is closest to making one. when that’s the ad hominem bit, then of course there’s little to do but note that there’s nothing else. in all other cases, however, if you feel drawn to note solely, or even primarily, that insult was present, that’s a good indication that you’re out of your element discussing logic. the safer method is to start with the core argument, mentioning the icing (e.g., insult, noting of irrelevant personal action) only peripherally.

[update 201101: underlying this topic is the often false assumption that someone's attempting a rebuttal. he may simply be calling you a dumbass, ignoring you, laughing at you, etc.]

Tags: ad hominem, credibility, fallacy, FAUX news, ron paul

Posted 20071005 14:01 under derailleur, emperor factory, government dumb. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.