The Mueller investigation.

No argument at all appears in that post - much less one directed "to the person" rather than to the merits of somebody else's argument or assertion.

The boneyard illiterate plural form - ad hominems* (https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96333/latin-plurals-when-talking-about-fallacies-) is particularly striking. It implies referral to multiple different arguments if interpreted as the contraction, multiple different target arguers if taken straight, and I have yet to see it refer to even one even once. It apparently always refers to insults, pejoratives, denigrations, and the like.

The term "ad hominem" has a meaning in English. It is short for "argumentum ad hominem". You can look it up in a dictionary, consult a usage manual that deals with the common confusions, etc. (This is one of the few terms the American Heritage 3rd whiffs on - but my other go-to, Garner's "Modern American Usage", is clear if brief. And there's always the internet, if you have the time - anything called "Webster" must be avoided, various other nonprescriptive listmaking travesties discarded, but definition and usage can be found).

It is not a synonym for insult, pejorative, denigration, etc. An ad hominem argument can be based on a compliment - that's rare, but possible.

The only shame is in willful ignorance and unnecessary illiteracy. It's like finding out one has been badly and publicly mispronouncing some word for years - no big deal, we all did that
(a couple of mine: "shortlived" has a long "i", as in "life", not a short one as in "live". The word "dour" rhymes with "pour", not "sour". )
unless and until one insists on mispronouncing it from then on as some kind of adolescent fuckyou.

Which is another obvious possibility for the persistence of the term's misuse among the American "conservative" or "traditional" or rightwing political crowd. The fuckyou reaction is another of their characteristics.

Just to bring things around, that reaction seems to be a significant factor in the all but universal refusal of Republicans to read the Mueller report - even in its carefully redacted Trump-protecting public edition.

* argumenta ad hominem, arguments ad hominem, or if defiant slang is your thing: ads hominem - at least that would make logical sense in some vague way.
Wow, that's a lot of pedantic bs. Do you really care THAT much about how Latin phrases are pluralized, or just trying to be insufferably condescending for its own sake?
For some reason the American right wing cannot use that term accurately - illiterate misuse of that term is a field mark of the American wingnut.
Nobody has explained that, afaik. My own guess is that it spread from the Republican media feeds they rely on for information, which are illiterate by design - one sees a lot of word for word repetition from those sources in general, and the term "ad hominem" seems to be especially attractive. It sounds intellectual or something, maybe.
Guilt by association is an ad hominem fallacy, which you here commit by immediately associating my use with the "American right wing", including "illiterate" and "wingnut", in lieu of any effort to show it was not ad hominem. Like I said, cute tactic. Only addresses the person without even glancing at the actual content.
As with your prior failures to grasp either the basic facts or fundamental civic processes you purport to assess and critique, the current problem with your attempt to apply an unbound statement to subject matter that does not fall within its range is ignorance.

For instance, your inability to follow along from post to post results, in some part, from not actually knowing what you're on about, just like when you waxed ignorant about the Seventeenth, or white supremacism, or even the basic difference between law and law enforcement; the problem with your argument is that it's excrement.
Presumptions of personal failings that are neither cited nor supported are ad hominem arguments in lieu of actual supporting or refuting argument. Here, they are vague arm-wavings in lieu supported reason. And he lost all credibility when he didn't have the intellectual honesty to admit he was duped:
Well, sure, but every job comes with obligations toward speech and conduct. Faithfully executing the laws precludes extorting foreign governments for help with conspiracy theories against political enemies in exchange for abiding the law.

If that's how people think you win an argument around here, that's on you. And your zealous pedantry trying to justify it screams overcompensation.
 
Last edited:
Wow, that's a lot of pedantic bs. Do you really care THAT much about how Latin phrases are pluralized, or just trying to be insufferably condescending for its own sake?
Iceaura really cares about presenting something which would be a valid argument. So, an error in pluralizing Latin phrases is an error that can be used to present you as an example of his beloved thesis that all his opponents, as well as all Reps, don't understand what ad hominem means.

There have been times in the past when such errors have really shown a lack of education, because Latin was part of what educated people had to learn, as the language of science. And even much later Latin remained part of high school education in Europe, even in communist Germany there remained a possibility to learn Latin at least in some of the higher schools. But today the standards became much lower, and not knowing how to pluralize in the Latin language is not even sufficient as an ad hominem. (In fact, what has been done was simply pluralizing following English rules. This is a reasonable strategy of enriching a language - incorporating foreign words but applying the rules of the own language to these words in grammatical constructions.)

But, given the importance of ad hominem for iceaura's discussion strategy, it is very important for him to attack all those who object if ad hominem is used. Therefore the invention of this funny standard "all my opponents don't use 'ad hominem' correctly" reply to such objections. And therefore even a minor and irrelevant inaccuracy will be used to support this meme.
 
Presumptions of personal failings that are neither cited nor supported are ad hominem arguments in lieu of actual supporting or refuting argument. Here, they are vague arm-wavings in lieu supported reason.

Wow, you needed a second go↑ at it?

It's almost of a third go, though not entirely; you recognized the point about the Seventeenth↑ a little over a week ago, so pretending ignorance isn't really an option on that one. And, besides, it seems you just wanted to object to what Iceaura was saying; you showed no clue, at the time↗, what you were on about. And your failure to grasp the basics of American white supremacism↗ also involves your your botching of the difference between law and law enforcement, or, as you had it, the law and the legal system↗, i.e., the means for enforcing laws.

So, to wind back to your post eight days ago:

What you imagine the popular election of US senators (17th amendment) has to do with any of this ....

As I pointed out, those failures are, like your present bungle about the Bidens, your argument relies on ignorance, or, at the very least, an extraordinary pretense thereof.

For instance, questions of the DNC's actions vis à vis Paul Manafort and records of his work in a deposed former government can become mired in the details of particular information and assistance, to the one, and the history of Party committees having anything whatsoever to do with foreign nationals and governments. In any case, as distasteful as the American people might find any foreign participation in our political discussions, that is a more general question than the particular differences between the DNC's behavior and whether or not the candidate or president is personally involved. As to the Biden story, what you're looking at are two aspects of American history often criticized but never properly addressed. One part is classism itself, which is a question pretty much any day, except it is brought to extraordinary focus by the proposition that Donald Trump and his supporters would attempt to sacrifice the entire American bourgeoisie, our American aristocracy, including Trump's own family, just to get a piece of Joe Biden. The other part of the Biden-PGA story has to do with American capitalism. The timeline reads grotesquely, but so does pretty much any complicated tangle of American political and business success.

And here we might as well mention a couple comparisons: Twenty-two emails a day, on average; all of eleven emails sent, and eleven received. We were supposed to panic about twenty-two emails a day in a personal account parsed by a lawyer's answer to a question. Do you even know why we were supposed to panic? Here's another twenty-two: When allegations of lawbreaking arose in the Department of Justice under George W. Bush, it turned out the Bush administration had outsourced its email needs to the RNC, who (¡ahem!) lost twenty-two million allegedly official government emails. But that episode wasn't something to panic about.

Speaking of a lawyer's answer: That's what got Bill Clinton into trouble. Playing word games about an extramarital affair was enough for impeachment. Coordinating a disinformation campaign to move the country to war was not. Well, you know, for Republicans.

It's easy to make certain arguments within a pretense of tabula rasa, as if nothing is defined. Part of the problem with your perpetual thoughtless partisan toeing of lines is that you don't seem to know what you're on about; it's not so much that your understanding of history is awry, but, rather, that you don't seem to have any substantial comprehension of the history your arguments pretend to address.

There is a rhetorical rule called the Principle of Charity, in which one is to seek the least condemning explanation for what someone else says. In more functional discourse, this can be very important in understanding what other people are saying; in more particular politics, though, it's part of what people are appealing to when begging sympathy for those who require harm unto others. In your case, though, it's more a lack of anything to sympathize with. When measuring dysfunctional discourse presented nearly enough to on cue, and very nearly hitting its marks, finding that charitable pathway is tricky, because the most part of the range is occupied by a dualistic proposition of willful versus accidental wrongness, and after enough repetitions we're up to that razor insult people like to brandish from time to time about criminality and stupidity. Or, scaled to the moment, it becomes a question of how you are so well and thoroughly uninformed and misinformed you turn out to be. And if you're not just going out of your way to be a poo-flinging troll, then please understand that striking, pointed ignorance isn't much better an option. In either case, you diminish yourself.

Or, as I noted last month↑, the particular ignorance Trump defenders seem to require in order to make their cases ranges well beyond unbelievable. And, to be certain, we get it, it's not just you. I covered that part↑, too.

And it's worth reminding that at some point we must check in with reality. When we're out on the valence that we can make this about George Soros because George W. Bush once gave Hunter Biden a cush job, well, no, we're not, unless someone comes up with a much, much better reason than what has long been known about Soros having money in Shrub. Which reminds, in turn: It wasn't simply the open cronyism of the Iraq War contracting, but where was all this rightist outrage about aristocracy, capitalism, and bourgeois privilege when it was the Bushes and the Carlyle Group? Right. It wasn't.

For the masses watching, suffering, enduring the games pretending gods and monsters, this is one time when it's a genuine both-sides, all-sides issue that nobody really knows what to do about, but therein lies the hook. The difference about questions of improperly handling classified materials come down to intent, parsed by lawyers; Colin Powell having his Yahoo account hacked while he was improperly conducting State Department business thereby is an historical footnote, but there are reasons he wasn't prosecuted. Same with any number of people we have and have not heard of, over the years. Really, though, who the hell complains that Sandy Berger got a raw deal? Sometimes, they just run out of excuses. But by what reasonable logic would you or anybody else expect the bourgeoisie, or even the working classes that loathe lawyers until they need one, to nuke the pretense of lawyerly parsing and rhetoric just to get one political opponent? That is, reasonable, which requires better logic than the already known corruption of the Republican Party, e.g., then-Majority Leader McCarthy did, in fact, boast of abusing Congressional power to harm political opponents.

Just like they're not going to blow up the perquisites of who they know and what those people can do toward family gain. It's not that there isn't anything to talk about; rather, the ignorance required to attend some discussions means some disproportionate share of the effort will be given to bringing the ostensibly uninformed up to par. There is much to discuss of classism and privilege in American society, and, sure, especially at the valence of national politics. So much of defending Donald Trump against his scandals is not so much a perverse take on history and discourse, but, rather, the absence of that history and discourse from the defense. It's not that you've a weird take on certain issues of history, but, rather, that they just don't seem to exist for you.

And that's how you keep screwing up your assessments. If there wasn't a history regarding institutional disruption of voters, questions about the Seventeenth Amendment in re Arizona Republicans wouldn't make sense; or, more directly, you couldn't understand what Iceaura said because you didn't know the history. Or, if there wasn't such a rich literary and historical record on the subject, maybe some person who happens to be a white guy from the South saying something about Anglo-American heritage to a roomful of southern sheriffs would be a funny story about how words work, or something; your innovation was to depart from the usual advocacy by simply not having a clue what you were on about. And, you know, if you hadn't botched up that part ... okay, look, the bit with the difference between law and law enforcement remains inexplicable.

Inasmuch as you might bawl about ad hominem, the problem is that you just don't stop with this sort of vapidity. To reiterate↑: As with your prior failures to grasp either the basic facts or fundamental civic processes you purport to assess and critique, the current problem with your attempt to apply an unbound statement to subject matter that does not fall within its range is ignorance. The resulting unreliability about your assessments is a reputation that precedes you.
 
Wow, that's a lot of pedantic bs. Do you really care THAT much about how Latin phrases are pluralized, or just trying to be insufferably condescending for its own sake?
You don't know what "pedantic" means - get a dictionary.
You haven't followed the posts you are replying to (nobody here cares that much about Latin plurals, but even a little bit of care reveals that pluralization of "Latin phrases" is not at issue, and makes no sense anyway) - reread for meaning. You'll need a dictionary, and a usage manual - my recommendations appear above.

I am trying to be insultingly condescending because I am replying to posts that have it coming in situations in which derision is the appropriate and indicated response (authoritarian agitprop falls to derision alone),

from people who deal in falsehood and attempted insult as a matter of course, and argument essentially never.
Guilt by association is an ad hominem fallacy,
Not usually. It can be part of one, of course - as can any other derogation, insult, pejorative, or the like.
Presumptions of personal failings that are neither cited nor supported are ad hominem arguments in lieu of actual supporting or refuting argument.
No, they aren't. They can be, but it's rare to see them in arguments at all.

You are doubling down on an illiteracy, after it has been pointed out to you in simple English sentences.

To restore the original point: As a general rule of thumb, incorrect use of the term "ad hominem", and especially the inevitably nonsensical "ad hominems", is a field mark of the Republican propaganda victim, the rightwing "conservative", the Trump apologist and "bothsides" backer. I don't know for sure why that is - a couple of explanations lie ready to hand, suggested above.
 
Last edited:
Iceaura really cares about presenting something which would be a valid argument.
Not here. I'm not arguing anything here - I'm making an observation, and a rather obvious one.
But today the standards became much lower, and not knowing how to pluralize in the Latin language is not even sufficient as an ad hominem.
As noted: a field mark of one particular political faction. Schmelzer cannot use the term accurately.
So, an error in pluralizing Latin phrases
It's not a phrase. It's a term.
In fact, what has been done was simply pluralizing following English rules
Nope. I included, under an asterisk, some suggestions for that - your illiterate misuse is not one of them. You can't pluralize the term for the same reason you can't use it meaningfully - you don't know what it means.
There have been times in the past when such errors have really shown a lack of education,
As a posted - explicitly, by me, right here - lack of education is not involved. As I stated, clearly and simply, for you to read: educational level is not correlated - lots of wingnuts are well-educated. That's part of the oddity of the fact - education does not explain their illiteracy, is not even correlated with it.
Political faction is.
Therefore the invention of this funny standard "all my opponents don't use 'ad hominem' correctly" reply to such objections.
You keep using quote marks to lie about other people. I don't post lousy grammar, for starters. I don't use anything like that as a "standard", and that's not what a "standard" is in English - you also need a dictionary, and the willingness to consult one.
So, once again, you are wrong about something you don't know anything about.
In this case, all you had to do was read my posts here - I clearly described the faction that misuses the term, and it isn't "all my opponents". It's maybe half of them? Something like that.

It is a large share of the crowd that refuses to read the Mueller Report, though - much more than half of them.
That is not a coincidence, imho - an adult's willful refusal to inform themself shows up in many ways. That refusal characterizes an entire class of Americans, and that political reality currently dominates US governance - local, State, and Federal.

As the response to the Mueller report highlighted.
 
Perhaps it is because those who value maintaing an objective position are not party aligned, right or left wing?
Not by the evidence.

Objective positions are Party aligned by default, in the US, due to what happened to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act (they are found almost exclusively among the Democratic and associated smaller Party memberships, while being vanishingly rare in the Republican Party since the fascist takeover of that Party). They are also correlated with left wing identity, but that is not the same as Party aligned (there are many right wing Democrats, and many independent or fringe aligned lefties).
 
As noted: a field mark of one particular political faction. Schmelzer cannot use the term accurately.
The field mark of one particular poster: Iceaura does not support his defamations by any evidence.
It's not a phrase. It's a term.
Your own link uses "the point is that ad ignorantiam and ad absurdum (and, for that matter, the principii in petitio principii) serve as adjectival phrases".
Nope. I included, under an asterisk, some suggestions for that - your illiterate misuse is not one of them.
Your source even gives examples where the similar construction is the only reasonable choice: 'For example, the plural of "non sequitur" and even of the absolutely ubiquitous noun "exit" must be "non sequiturs" and "exits" respectively'. Other variants have been proposed for the plural of "argumentum ad hominem", but not for "ad hominem" taken alone (except for adding "arguments").

So, even if you should be, as the native speaker, the obvious winner in such an argument with a native German speaker (who is often mislead by differences in the meaning of the English word and its German variant), your points appear to be weak and are in conflict even with your own sources. (As usual - the reason why you don't use links to evidence in the discussion with me, you know that I look at them and find the weak places. Even in this case, you have not simply given me the link, I had to search for it following a verbal description of the place where you have posted the link.)
 
Your own link uses "the point is that ad ignorantiam and ad absurdum (and, for that matter, the principii in petitio principii) serve as adjectival phrases".
But argumentum ad hominem does not, as used in these threads. You, for example, have never used it or its shorthand 'ad hominem' as an adjectival phrase. You use it as a synonym for insult, pejorative, and like terms.
But, given the importance of ad hominem for iceaura's discussion strategy,
I've never posted an ad hominem argument on this forum. I've never used the term "ad hominem" as a synonym for insult, and never pluralized it.
The field mark of one particular poster: Iceaura does not support his defamations by any evidence.
Multiple quotes frequently and at least one quoted and designated example every time - dozens of them, by now. Including this very post, using post 147 as evidence.
Other variants have been proposed for the plural of "argumentum ad hominem", but not for "ad hominem" taken alone (except for adding "arguments")
Ad hominem taken alone is and has been - many times here, and by dictionary reference on top of usage manual reference - explicitly and repeatedly defined and referred to as shorthand for argumentum ad hominem. The ubiquitous "ad hominems" that litters the posts of the rightwing propaganda parrots is then flagrantly illiterate - it does not even agree with standard English pluralization of a term, as noted above.
Your source even gives examples where the similar construction is the only reasonable choice
Being an illiteracy in the first place, it offers no reasonable choice for the plural - one would have to be referring to multiple different arguments, and the posters who use the term are seldom referring to any argument at all.
your points appear to be weak and are in conflict even with your own sources.
Nope. Reread, try to bear down a bit. I am teaching you something - it's an opportunity for you to learn. And not only about an odd pattern found in American political rhetoric, but about the effects of your dependence on US professional propaganda sources for your framing of US politics and discussion.
As usual - the reason why you don't use links to evidence in the discussion with me, you know that I look at them and find the weak places.
I know if you pay any attention to them at all (rare) you will make a mess of things trying to defend an idiocy, as you just did. Then - in a week or so - you will deny seeing the link (as you did with AGW, and again here with the Mueller report).
Life is short. You don't learn. You still haven't read the Mueller report, for example.

A couple of days ago my local Federal House Congressman Tom Emmer - a Trump loyal Republican, but I repeat myself - held a "town hall" meeting, and tried to feed his audience the same bullshit you are posting here. He delivered his opinions about the Mueller report with confidence, and they were the same as yours down to the language he used (including the claim that it contained no evidence of "collusion", and the emphasis on its failure to indict Trump) -
and it turned out he had not read it. Just as you haven't.

Remember the rule of thumb - common errors in common wording imply common sources? The basic rule for identifying sources in propaganda feeds, that is. So it's right in your claimed area of expertise - you and this guy https://emmer.house.gov are getting your info from the same sources.

And my money says you think that's an "ad hominem".
 
But argumentum ad hominem does not, as used in these threads. You, for example, have never used it or its shorthand 'ad hominem' as an adjectival phrase. You use it as a synonym for insult, pejorative, and like terms.
That's simply nonsense.
I've never posted an ad hominem argument on this forum. I've never used the term "ad hominem" as a synonym for insult, and never pluralized it.
You use your artificially restricted personal definition of ad hominem to deny that many of your arguments are ad hominem. Of course, you also use simple primitive attacks.
Ad hominem taken alone is and has been - many times here, and by dictionary reference on top of usage manual reference - explicitly and repeatedly defined and referred to as shorthand for argumentum ad hominem. The ubiquitous "ad hominems" that litters the posts of the rightwing propaganda parrots is then flagrantly illiterate - it does not even agree with standard English pluralization of a term, as noted above.
As incorrectly noted above. Then, shorthands are often handled differently in grammatic.
Being an illiteracy in the first place, it offers no reasonable choice for the plural - one would have to be referring to multiple different arguments, and the posters who use the term are seldom referring to any argument at all.
A living language invents something new if necessary.
I am teaching you something - it's an opportunity for you to learn.
A propagandist presenting himself as a teacher, lol. (Of course, propagandists like this, and also often are teachers, to indoctrinate the next generation is, last but not least, important.)
Life is short. You don't learn. You still haven't read the Mueller report, for example.
I learn a lot, from sources that can be reasonably expected to contain interesting information. The Mueller report is, according to what you wrote about it, not among them.
Remember the rule of thumb - common errors in common wording imply common sources? The basic rule for identifying sources in propaganda feeds, that is. So it's right in your claimed area of expertise - you and this guy https://emmer.house.gov are getting your info from the same sources.
The point being? His source is plausibly what Barr told about it. My source is, in some part, the same, I even openly referred to Barr. So, you have shown something that has never been disputed.

I have taken into account what you and others have written here about the report after it was published. Once you were unable to present anything beyond ad hominem arguments, there was no necessity to change my position. As ad hominems (short for ad hominem arguments), they were quite plausible, but they cannot do more than increasing doubt about the claim I have used, and some doubt was already explicitly mentioned in my first reference to Barr. Everything beyond increased doubt would be as stupid as saying \(2+2\neq 4\) because Hitler said \(2+2=4\).
And my money says you think that's an "ad hominem".
Your monkey is wrong, as usual. In the context of this discussion, it is simply a failed attack against me.

To identify it as ad hominem, one would have to introduce a much wider context. What is the aim of all those boring "your sources are Rep propaganda sources" repetitions? It is obviously to discredit everything I write about US internal policy questions. According to your artificial restrictions, this would not be ad hominem. But they are quite artificial. So, the aim is quite obvious a discreditation of the content of my claims about US policy questions. It works by identifying them with Rep propaganda in combination with presenting Rep propaganda as especially evil and professional lies. If one applies the same ad hominem argument against a lot of different arguments (all arguments I make about internal US policy) this somehow makes them not ad hominem? That's laughable.

So, if something is ad hominem or not depends on the context, and, given that as "the context" one can use different things (a particular post and the answer, a whole thread, or a whole history of conversations) the result may be different.

In the context of this thread, this particular attack was simply a laughable failure, given that in this case, it was never in question that I had used Barr as a source, and, moreover, off-topic, because for this topic it is completely irrelevant if I have used the same source as this Emmer.
 
An interesting thought came to mind in regard to "size" of government as that is always a bone of contention between conservatives and progressives.

Conservatives demand the smallest possible representative size of government, which is achieved in a "Dictatorship", where the people are ruled by a single person who rules by "power" and makes law in accordance to his wishes.

Progressives demand the largest possible representative size of government, which is achieved in a "Democray", where representatives of the entire population rule by "vote" and make law in accordance to the people's wishes.

So today we have achieved the smallest form of government ruled by a dictator. Does anyone think Dictatiorship is a desirable form of government? Shall we return to a Democracy?
 
Last edited:
Question: If the President shoots someone on 5th ave with impunity, but the target kills the president in self-defense, is the target guilty of murder?
 
An interesting thought came to mind in regard to "size" of government as that is always a bone of contention between conservatives and progressives.

Conservatives demand the smallest possible representative size of government, which is achieved in a "Dictatorship", where the people are ruled by a single person who rules by "power" and makes law in accordance to his wishes.

Progressives demand the largest possible representative size of government, which is achieved in a "Democray", where representatives of the entire population rule by "vote" and make law in accordance to the people's wishes.

So today we have achieved the smallest form of government ruled by a dictator. Does anyone think Dictatiorship is a desirable form of government? Shall we return to a Democracy?
Conservatives don't want small government, they only want it small in influence with respect to how much it can control the rich, large in everything else.
 
Conservatives don't want small government, they only want it small in influence with respect to how much it can control the rich, large in everything else.
Usually large in military/industrial complex programs and incentives . Very small in social programs.

Which social programs have already been crippled? Education, Healthcare, Social services?
 
Last edited:
You don't know what "pedantic" means - get a dictionary.
I trust the intelligence of any readers to know otherwise.
You haven't followed the posts you are replying to (nobody here cares that much about Latin plurals, but even a little bit of care reveals that pluralization of "Latin phrases" is not at issue, and makes no sense anyway) - reread for meaning. You'll need a dictionary, and a usage manual - my recommendations appear above.
So this wasn't you?
The boneyard illiterate plural form - ad hominems* (https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96333/latin-plurals-when-talking-about-fallacies-) is particularly striking. It implies referral to multiple different arguments if interpreted as the contraction, multiple different target arguers if taken straight, and I have yet to see it refer to even one even once. It apparently always refers to insults, pejoratives, denigrations, and the like.
from people who deal in falsehood and attempted insult as a matter of course, and argument essentially never.
I couldn't ask for more apropos projection.
Not usually. It can be part of one, of course - as can any other derogation, insult, pejorative, or the like.
Why do you keep sounding as if ad hominem is just "derogation, insult, pejorative"? A crucial aspect is it's use in lieu of argument. Otherwise it's just derogation, insult, and pejorative, which can always be in addition to valid argumentation. And yes, guilt by association is a bare assertion ad hominem when no further support is given. It's the form: if A is bad and B is associated with A, then B is bad, without any argument whatsoever to justify the association nor the conclusion.
No, they aren't. They can be, but it's rare to see them in arguments at all.
They are there for anyone to see, and again, when used in lieu of argument, they are ad hominem...or another in the irrelevancy family of fallacies.
You are doubling down on an illiteracy, after it has been pointed out to you in simple English sentences.
Again, I'm happy trusting the intelligence of the reader.
 
Wow, you needed a second go↑ at it?

It's almost of a third go, though not entirely; you recognized the point about the Seventeenth↑ a little over a week ago, so pretending ignorance isn't really an option on that one.
Are you saying that you're ignorant of the fact that the original 17th Amendment called for Senators to be elected by the state legislature? Otherwise, what's your point? Just unsupported ad hominem?
And, besides, it seems you just wanted to object to what Iceaura was saying; you showed no clue, at the time↗, what you were on about.
Obvious and unrefuted citation to the contrary.
And your failure to grasp the basics of American white supremacism↗ also involves your your botching of the difference between law and law enforcement, or, as you had it, the law and the legal system↗, i.e., the means for enforcing laws.
Yeah, you failed that Rorschach test, apparently eager to find racism by splitting pedantic but irrelevant hairs. I'm not so eager for racism to exist.
As to the Biden story, what you're looking at are two aspects of American history often criticized but never properly addressed. One part is classism itself, which is a question pretty much any day, except it is brought to extraordinary focus by the proposition that Donald Trump and his supporters would attempt to sacrifice the entire American bourgeoisie, our American aristocracy, including Trump's own family, just to get a piece of Joe Biden. The other part of the Biden-PGA story has to do with American capitalism. The timeline reads grotesquely, but so does pretty much any complicated tangle of American political and business success.
That sounds so much more like a condemnation of Biden than a defense.
And here we might as well mention a couple comparisons: Twenty-two emails a day, on average; all of eleven emails sent, and eleven received. We were supposed to panic about twenty-two emails a day in a personal account parsed by a lawyer's answer to a question. Do you even know why we were supposed to panic? Here's another twenty-two: When allegations of lawbreaking arose in the Department of Justice under George W. Bush, it turned out the Bush administration had outsourced its email needs to the RNC, who (¡ahem!) lost twenty-two million allegedly official government emails. But that episode wasn't something to panic about.
Whataboutism is not an argument.
Speaking of a lawyer's answer: That's what got Bill Clinton into trouble. Playing word games about an extramarital affair was enough for impeachment. Coordinating a disinformation campaign to move the country to war was not. Well, you know, for Republicans.
Again, impeachment is political, relying solely on political will, not criminal. So this falls into the "and?" category.
It's easy to make certain arguments within a pretense of tabula rasa, as if nothing is defined. Part of the problem with your perpetual thoughtless partisan toeing of lines is that you don't seem to know what you're on about; it's not so much that your understanding of history is awry, but, rather, that you don't seem to have any substantial comprehension of the history your arguments pretend to address.
Yet no examples given other than your own partisan disagreements. Ho-hum.
Or, as I noted last month↑, the particular ignorance Trump defenders seem to require in order to make their cases ranges well beyond unbelievable. And, to be certain, we get it, it's not just you. I covered that part↑, too.
Again, you simply presume your partisan take as fact, dismissing any opposition without any real argument, as evidenced in so much of this post of yours.
And it's worth reminding that at some point we must check in with reality. When we're out on the valence that we can make this about George Soros because George W. Bush once gave Hunter Biden a cush job, well, no, we're not, unless someone comes up with a much, much better reason than what has long been known about Soros having money in Shrub. Which reminds, in turn: It wasn't simply the open cronyism of the Iraq War contracting, but where was all this rightist outrage about aristocracy, capitalism, and bourgeois privilege when it was the Bushes and the Carlyle Group? Right. It wasn't.
You seem to miss the simple fact that no one on the right gave a crap about Hunter Biden until the left wanted to make a big and hypocritical deal about Trump's interactions with Ukraine. Nor has there been "rightist outrage about aristocracy, capitalism, and bourgeois privilege" without some inciting incident from the left, where such outrage is simply pointing out hypocrisy. If the left ever worried about cleaning their own house before attacking their neighbor's, they'd be immune to the counter attack.
Just like they're not going to blow up the perquisites of who they know and what those people can do toward family gain. It's not that there isn't anything to talk about; rather, the ignorance required to attend some discussions means some disproportionate share of the effort will be given to bringing the ostensibly uninformed up to par. There is much to discuss of classism and privilege in American society, and, sure, especially at the valence of national politics. So much of defending Donald Trump against his scandals is not so much a perverse take on history and discourse, but, rather, the absence of that history and discourse from the defense. It's not that you've a weird take on certain issues of history, but, rather, that they just don't seem to exist for you.
I guess you imagine you've demonstrated such ignorance, but you have merely assumed it, belying any attempt at the principle of charity. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy seemingly designed to serve you with an unending font of supposedly justified ad hominem fodder. I think discerning readers are smarter than that.
And that's how you keep screwing up your assessments. If there wasn't a history regarding institutional disruption of voters, questions about the Seventeenth Amendment in re Arizona Republicans wouldn't make sense; or, more directly, you couldn't understand what Iceaura said because you didn't know the history. Or, if there wasn't such a rich literary and historical record on the subject, maybe some person who happens to be a white guy from the South saying something about Anglo-American heritage to a roomful of southern sheriffs would be a funny story about how words work, or something; your innovation was to depart from the usual advocacy by simply not having a clue what you were on about. And, you know, if you hadn't botched up that part ... okay, look, the bit with the difference between law and law enforcement remains inexplicable.
Wow, I must have grown bored of those threads far to early for you to be so doggedly hanging onto them after all this time. Completely ignoring that no one ever disputed any history. Again, you merely presumed it.
Inasmuch as you might bawl about ad hominem, the problem is that you just don't stop with this sort of vapidity. To reiterate↑: As with your prior failures to grasp either the basic facts or fundamental civic processes you purport to assess and critique, the current problem with your attempt to apply an unbound statement to subject matter that does not fall within its range is ignorance. The resulting unreliability about your assessments is a reputation that precedes you.
You presuming to connect dots you don't or cannot actually connect has nothing to do with me, no matter how much you may feel you need a scapegoat when called out. You seem incapable of defining your supposed "range" while endlessly complaining about it not being respected. Just vague arm-waving in the neighborhood of ad hominem.

Alack.
 
I trust the intelligence of any readers to know otherwise.
Any excuse to avoid the dictionary will do, apparently.
Why do you keep sounding as if ad hominem is just "derogation, insult, pejorative"?
The opposite, explicitly. Wax in your ears?
I couldn't ask for more apropos projection.
You could try posting relevance. In theory, anyway.
So this wasn't you?
Today's just not your day to make a point, apparently.
Try getting some sleep, rereading, making sense, -
They are there for anyone to see, and again, when used in lieu of argument, they are ad hominem..
1) Uh, no, ad hominem argument is not used "in lieu of" argument. It is argument. By definition, you see. It's that dictionary thing, again - a nuisance, I know, but give it a try.
2) And from the other end: when not, not.
Or did you overlook that half of the matter - maybe forget to actually read the posts you quoted?

You have posted something that's goofy from both ends. An achievement, of a kind.
Again, I'm happy trusting the intelligence of the reader.
That's a good bet - there are lots of intelligent wingnuts here, and essentially none of them can use the term "ad hominem" correctly.

For some reason, wingnuts simply cannot use the term "ad hominem". Education makes no difference, intelligence makes no difference - apparently, they have been mentally crippled by a political viewpoint.

As mentioned before, that's kind of remarkable. How in hell does a political stance do that kind of damage?
 
I have taken into account what you and others have written here about the report after it was published.
You haven't.
You have not, for example, taken into account that there is a lot of evidence of collusion in it, and many crimes as well as impeachable offenses described.
A living language invents something new if necessary
Ad hominem argument is not new. Neither are the correct terms for its errant and illiterate misuses by the American rightwing propaganda machinery.
That's simply nonsense.
Try to quote an example - or even invent one - of "ad hominem" used as an adjectival phrase, by you or any wingnut here.
What is the aim of all those boring "your sources are Rep propaganda sources" repetitions?
Repetition. It's how one counters propaganda of that kind.
It is obviously to discredit everything I write about US internal policy questions.
No. It's to counter your parroting of propaganda. You write little or nothing about internal US policy questions - you don't know what they are.
It works by identifying them with Rep propaganda in combination with presenting Rep propaganda as especially evil and professional lies.
Nope. That's not how it works, and not what it's for.
- - - -
Your monkey is wrong, as usual. In the context of this discussion, it is simply a failed attack against me.
To identify it as ad hominem, one would have to introduce a much wider context.
If one applies the same ad hominem argument against a lot of different arguments (all arguments I make about internal US policy) this somehow makes them not ad hominem? That's laughable.
My money says you don't even see what happened there.
- - - -
it was never in question that I had used Barr as a source
You and Emmer have common sources for all US political info, not just about Barr - that's why you parrot Republican propaganda, same as Emmer.
A propagandist presenting himself as a teacher, lol.
You could learn that I am not a propagandist. You could "extract information" from my posts even without learning that. But you won't - your sources forbid you from even ordinary factchecking. Emmer does not factcheck, either.
So, if something is ad hominem or not depends on the context, and, given that as "the context" one can use different things (a particular post and the answer, a whole thread, or a whole history of conversations) the result may be different.
And the cat escapes the bag.

The context is provided by the one making the argument. When you change people's arguments in order to mislabel them, as you and your fellow wingnuts so often do when misusing language, you are being dishonest.

And to bring it around - that's what you guys do whenever posting about the Mueller report. You won't read it, and you will change all arguments about it to match the media feed from your sources - Republican propaganda, corporate paid and corporate fed. That's how you roll.
 
Last edited:
Hey, if you consider invalid arguments argument, that's your business. I don't.
By definition, you see. It's that dictionary thing, again - a nuisance, I know, but give it a try.
I consider an argumentum ad hominem to be an argument - as do all others literate in the English language: https://www.thoughtco.com/ad-hominem-fallacy-1689062
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy that involves a personal attack: an argument based on the perceived failings of an adversary rather than on the merits of the case. In short, it's when your rebuttal to an opponent's position is an irrelevant attack on the opponent personally rather than the subject at hand, to discredit the position by discrediting its supporter.
Or relevantly here:
Today's just not your day to make a point, apparently.
Try getting some sleep, rereading, making sense, -
(Btw, the wingnut mental glitch around "ad hominem" is not alone, and we have another one here: in a post from that faction, everything after the word "if" is either deliberately false or bullshit. They are not capable of a relevant "if").
And meanwhile, the minor observation of factual reality remains:
To restore the original point: As a general rule of thumb, incorrect use of the term "ad hominem", and especially the inevitably nonsensical "ad hominems", is a field mark of the Republican propaganda victim, the rightwing "conservative", the Trump apologist and "bothsides" backer.
And the relevance to the Mueller report?

The dismissal for cause of Barr as a source of information about it is not an ad hominem.

It's the basis of an observation about every one - every single one - of the public commenters here (and almost all in the big world) who don't accept the Mueller report as the informative and fact based account it manifestly is. They never have or ever will read the Mueller report, they parrot Barr's schtick, they do not factcheck, and they are identifiable by faction - in part by their characteristic inability to use the term "ad hominem" correctly, coupled with the frequency with which they use it.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top