[alecb]

So you're digestion of her letter should not be informed in anyway by the fact that she routinely employed the tactics that she now claims she's a victim of? She's spent her career vilifying and seeking out personal retribution for people who she's disagreed with, I don't know how this doesn't factor into one's purview.

[ashconnor]

I think readers here think that you are engaging in an "Ad hominem" attack on Weiss but since she herself is the subject of discussion I don't see why you wouldn't include her historical contradictory actions in a response.

[kyledrake]

It's very appropriate to call someone out on their actions if they are completely inconsistent with what they are claiming to value whenever it stops being useful to them. This isn't a scoring panel for high school speech and debate class.

[jirdperson]

I certainly don’t think that. What “ideas” that Bari Weiss presents in this essay does your conversational counterpoint here fail to engage? And why is the context of her hypocrisy not relevant?

[ritchiea]

Aren’t there times when an ad hominem attack is fitting?

If I have a documented history of a certain type of bad behavior and turn around to say I’m a victim of exactly that same sort of behavior. If I write a screed about my victimhood it does lie in the background that my own behavior likely seeded the negativity I received in return.

In that sense this goes beyond “ad hominem attack”. The accusation is more accurately that Bari Weiss is a bad faith actor in a system of mutual journalistic integrity, accusing her current colleagues of being bad faith actors. I don’t know if her colleagues are bad faith actors are not but Weiss does seem to be a case of “the pot calling the kettle black” or whataboutism which should be taken seriously rather than dismissed as ad hominem.

[ashconnor]

> Aren’t there times when an ad hominem attack is fitting?

Yes! That's why I'm saying it's relevant.

[koheripbal]

> I don't see why you wouldn't include her historical contradictory actions in a response.

...because that's a bad faith argument. Arguing the arguer rather than the argument is not an honest debate.

I don't care about Wiess specifically - I care, as most here, about the cancer of Cancel Culture.

[gfodor]

If you read my comment and assumed I was making an argument of absolutism, ie, that you should never consider the speaker in any way, you should re-read it and consider how it may have led you there.

In any case, a person’s background should be fair to consider when an argument by that person is raised. The anti-pattern is to use that, among other things, at the exclusion of any direct engagement of the argument, as was done by the comment I was replying to.

We are not living in a world plagued by people ignoring the background of authors or the subtext of writing they disagree with, and blindly focusing on arguments. We are living in a world where arguments themselves are routinely ignored by focusing exclusively on their authors and presumed subtext.

Unlike the former scenario, which doesn’t exist from my vantage point, the latter scenario seems more difficult to unwind since it terminates in unfalsifiability. If you stand firm that a certain phrase signals some kind of latent subtext, and that can be used to discredit the whole thing, then that tactic basically results in an equilibrium where arguments can not stand on their own under any circumstance since a clever reframing, which cannot be disproven, is fatal to them.