Ironically, what sent them into this tizzy was my pointing out that Neanderthals werenāt a different āSpecies,ā not by the only empirical measures we have.
The ability to interbreed may not be the perfect test for when two populations are still the same āSpeciesā but, it is the best test. And not only did Neanderthals & so-called āModernsā interbreed but Neanderthals have billions of descendants alive today!Ā
Anyway, hereās the meltdown the idiot suffered because I contradicted the āSeparate Speciesā dogma...
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Attacking your opponent's character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument.
Ad hominem is one of the more cut & dry of the fallacious arguments, or you might think so anyway. But I can't even tell you how many times I've seen some fool denounce something as "Ad Hominem" when it wasn't. Well...
See, an "Ad Hominem" argument is when you attack the person. Well not really. Or at least that alone does not qualify as a fallacy, a "fallacious argument." And as the subject *Is* indeed fallacies, fallacious arguments, then just attacking/insulting a person doesn't work. The attack/insult has to be made AS THE ARGUMENT or, if you prefer, IN PLACE OF THE ARGUMENT. And this is where the nutters get lost. You can type out whole paragraphs dissecting another's position and explaining precisely why they are wrong, but if they're stupid enough you need sneak in only one word of insult somewhere in there and they'll denounce the whole thing as "Ad Hominem." Next, as a fallacious argument, they'll insist that your "Ad Hominem" totally invalidates your claim that Albany, and not NYC, is the capital of New York...
Alright, for a real world example of Ad Hominem I point you to this idiocy posted in response to my observation that abiogenesis is not a scientifically valid idea as it can not be falsified:
Ā Ā Ā ....interestingly enough, it also doubles as a "straw man" argument because I for one never mentioned "Magic" anywhere. I never even claimed that abiogenesis is false, only that it's not legitimate science as it can not be falsified. And, seriously, just how stupid do you have to be to think:Ā "What, you think it can't be falsified?Ā Clearly you think that means it has to be false!"
Note:Ā The above, though insulting, does not qualify as "Ad Hominem" because as insulting as my argument might be to the idiot (assuming someone explains it to them), the insult isn't my argument. My argument is their utter failure at logic which I just pointed out, the personal insult is just something I added to show how much I care... and to illustrate my previous point.
An argument that sometimes fools human reasoning, but is not logically valid. It is crucial to remember that reasoning from definitions and facts to conclusions is fundamentally different from reasoning about definitions. Before you can scientifically establish whether or not Foo is a Bar, you have to establish the meaning of the label Bar.
The more insidious type of fallacious argument, and this comes more from established readers than from the probable trolls, is black/white, or Manichean, thinking. Anyone who has studied propaganda will tell you that purveyors of that dark art work hard to eliminate nuance, and force āwith us or against usā choices on people when the options are almost without exception more complex.
[...] But there is also a subtler, and ultimately more important issue: no one in a position of power is going to be pristine, which is the standard some readers wanted to apply to Bair and others. Having influence means making compromises.
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Why do people take useful, commonplace concepts and define them in such a way that they don't exist?
Like, I always run into people whose arguments run something like this:
Let q contain pā§~p
If q, then contradiction
Therefore ~q
Okay, um, well, I can construct a logical definition of q that does notĀ contain a statement of the form pā§~p and that actually matches up with the casual definition that people use for q, so I'm just going to ignore that argument?
This is how I feel about people who insist that true love does not exist. How are you defining true love in such a way that it does not exist and why are you doing that? Is love a meaningful concept? If not, then what exactly do you call all this love that people are having? If so, what is your objection to 'true' love? Are you using some weird unattainable societal ideal of true love, like, I dunno, both partners being completely unselfish? If so, stop doing that. That definition of true love is shitty and I don't want it. Let's define true love as something that mature, thoughtful people actually want and occasionally achieve, since, you know, it seems to be a thing that people like talking about and you can't make them stop just by twisting the phrase.
