| Uhhhh, Imma suggest you don't know what an ad hominem attack is. Ad Hominem comes from latin "To the person." It is when you attack the person rather than their argument. When you call the author stupid, you're ignoring her argument and attacking her person/character. You could call the argument stupid (and then hopefully go on to elaborate why you think it's stupid), and that would avoid it. But as long as you're commenting on the writer's intelligence, you're guilty of an ad hominem fallacy. It's also subjective and not rigorous. There's no way to measure "stupid". The fact the writer is writing about her own experiences doesn't make it okay to insult them. It just means you have to separate why their experiences don't justify their beliefs. > So, saying it’s ok for cops to murder George Floyd because Candice Owens convinced me he wasn’t a good guy is an example of an ad hominem attack. I think you're talking about the Candace Owens bit as being ad hominem? The tricky piece of this, is that 'bad' is so vague that it could be properly labeling an outlook from our legal system or it could be, as you say, an ad hominem attack. It doesn't matter what George's character was because he should be innocent until proven guilty. But at the point he's guilty, he might be considered "bad". None of that is justification for what happened to him, so I think you might be correct that it's an ad hominem, but it's murky at best. "Easily swayed by faulty logic" is a much better statement about the author, that I would agree with. It's also not an ad hominem, because it doesn't denigrate the author's character, because the same could be true of people who fall for phishing scams. There's nothing inherently character assassinating about having faulty logic. Whereas "stupid" is a subjective pejorative. |
I’d suggest I can at least identify one when I see it. For instance I’ve just quoted one ;)