On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 10:59:44AM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote: > > Andreas made an ill-formed proposal which the project secretary > > rejected for this ballot, and refused all suggestions about how it > > should be properly formed. He appears to hold a grudge, I'm not sure > > why. > > Ah, never retain from a ad-hominem attacks, eh? Oh, come on. That was not an argument, therefore it cannot *possibly* be an instance of argumentum ad hominem. It was simply data, so that people can evaluate your statements in context; I see no reason to posit an actual argument, as any rational person should be able to figure it out on their own. "Data which I do not like" does not constitute argumentum ad hominem. The world is full of things that you don't like, and you don't get to reject them just because you don't like them. I'm getting really tired of this cargo-cult approach to debate that has appeared on the mailing lists in the past year or two. "argumentum ad hominem" is precisely the set of arguments that say "This argument is wrong because of (some feature of) the person that said it". These arguments are fallacious. Nothing else about them is significant. Labelling everything you find objectionable as "ad hominem" is pointless, because it's wrong. It is *absolutely not the case* that "anything which reflects badly on a given person is wrong". You only get to invoke the classical fallacies as a short-circuit to avoid a full response when the argument proposed *is* one of the classical fallacies. Their purpose is simply to avoid spending time explaining the nature of the fallacy - it is assumed that everybody involved understands why it is wrong, and you are simply pointing this out as a substitute for the standard response. Furthermore you are expected to explain the fallacy if somebody involved does not understand it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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