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by danaris 30 days ago
That's not an ad hominem, though?

Ad hominem would be if shimman had said something like "don't post rebuttals from people who are stupid meanyheads". Identifying a characteristic of the posters that affects their incentives is a perfectly legitimate reason to discredit their posts, or at least call their impartiality into question.

1 comments

From wikipedia:

>Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem ('an argument to the person'), refers to when a speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.

>motive

Emphasis mine.