Ad Hominem : A How-To Guide to Ignorance

As you will see in a few posts from now, the Positionists (new phrase I'm coining) of the left and right are growing further and further apart, slipping farther and farther from logic, and growing more and more annoying by the hour. I would have once called myself a thinking liberal, but I'm clearly more and more moderate everyday.

All that prologue-ing is for my asshole friends who constantly want me to defend issues I don't even believe in, simply because they are positionists angling for a fight. Today is why you are an idiot regardless of which side of the redundancy coin you pick.

On with the show.

Ad Hominem is the concept that since I can't refute what you are saying (or don't understand what you are saying), I will simply attack you. Thus, if I prove you're an idiot, therefore your position/opinion/essay must also be stupid. It is a type of fallacy you should have learned about in logic class.

Blame a teacher.

For the right, this is a powerful tool. Getting right-wingers to hate the left is like feeding fish fish-food. So, just calling people who believe in Global Warming, shitfuck-meathead-dickweeds you've eliminated all of their arguments about carbon emissions in one swoop. There's no need to find evidence to refute global warming alarmism, because the cognitive bias of people who already hate theories from the left is already entrenched. Your work is done.

For the left, this is an alarmist tool, used to create hysteria where this is none. For instance, a left-winger concludes that eating meat is bad. The person listening to the hippie wants to know more and asks for more critical insight, because their theory is inconclusive. The vegan can then infer that this is ad hominem (which it is not), because "haters gotta hate," which is brain-damage code for "your criticism scares me and I want to go home now." The leftist authoritarian has used a contrived, but effective method of ad hominem by invoking it's name in an instance when it was not used, by claiming that the critic of their theory "smacks of ah hominem," thus using it.

Pretty sneaky sis.

And while these are big generalizations, they are not far from the reality of how we see blogos and pundits chest-pounding their way across the internet (and Fox News). What's interesting is when the sides switch tactics, which is an even more desperate ploy. And a lot fun to watch, as pedantic "warriors of the faith" attempt to use the tools of their enemies.

Sort of like a monkey trying to hot-wire a pick-up truck.

That's all for today's lesson plan. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of "Fallacies Not Forgotten." Tune in next time for, "Causation My Ass : My Job Went to India."