On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 06:57:19PM +0200, Daniel Dekany wrote:
Thursday, July 3, 2003, 4:56:40 PM, Tim Colson wrote:
It seems a bit daft.
AFAICS, this is based on some perverse, distorted version of the MVC
paradigm.
Anyway, that's what Tim Colson wants, and it's nutty enough that neither
An ad hominem attack is necessarily on another person's character, not on their ideas.
Agreed. And by saying that my request was "daft" and based on "some
perverse, distorted..." which I took to implies and insinuate that I
have those qualities of character in order to create such an idea. That
is offensive to me.
Well, if its an OT thread anyway... a little theological course (seems that FM people are experts in this field... :)). Ad hominem attack is when the other persons tells something that is *irrelevant* regarding the disputed question, to discredit you in general. For example, I say that Vel. people was unfair with WebMacro people, and then the a Vel. people bring up that: "Note that Daniel was in prison for 3 times because of raping... he is a such man." This discredits everything else what I said, because I'm such a bad man in general. In this case I have suffered an Ad hominem attack. Typical method in politics.
If somebody thinks that your idea is a nonsense, and he tells you that "You are an IDIOOOOOT!", then it cleanly means that he strongly believes that your idea is an utter nonsense, *this way* you must be stupid, brain-damaged, etc. Now, this can be offending, and can be an attack, but it's in no way an *Ad hominem* attack.
I don't think your definition is correct:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Ad+hominem&db=*
Certainly the usage that I'm familiar with allows for ad hominem attacks
to be pertinent, but separate from the real topic. That is, describing
the person as daft would qualify, even if it has some bearing on the
discussion; but calling the idea daft does not (in the quote above, it
is the idea that is described that way).
The idea was described as daft. It was always the ideas that were being characterized negatively, not the person.
There was no ad-hominem attack.
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
FreeMarker XML transformation capabilities, http://freemarker.org/docs/xgui.html
Language is usage of course,
and it does change.
Using the phrase "perverse, distorted" is stands out because of the extremely strong connotations associated with "perverse ideas" -- it's hard to avoid that there is a certain degree of personal smearing going on when that term is used rather than something more neutral like: "based on an incorrect idea of the MVC paradigm." The words used do suggest this could be described as "ad hominem abusive":
http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/attack.htm
Regardless of the definition you choose want to use for ad hominem, from my perspective as a lurker, the terms used seemed excessive and unhelpful, and they did seem designed to attack the person as someone worth of being dismissed.
cheers --
Ed, who has used -- and does not like -- templating systems which allow no real logic in the display layer
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