Here is my reply to Zach's post.
"Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
I spend at least 30 hours a week studying American politics and participating in "genuine discussion of the topic at hand" i.e., Donald Trump and his political movement.
However, I also use ad hominem argument.
Because "character, motive and other attributes" are essential qualities in elected representatives and "character,""motive" and "authority" need to be addressed directly.
Indeed "character" is linchpin in any discussion of political representatives and it is precisely in the domain of character that Trump should be characterized in an ad hominem way. (I am not saying that criticism should be limited to ad hominem "attacks" and I will further comment on this issue below.)
Before detailing some of the "character" traits and "motives" that, by my lights, require categorical condemnation as an adjunct to rigorous elucidation of his insanely irrational, totally random and constantly changing "arguments" - http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/05/david-brooks-trumps-thoughts-are-six.html - let me answer your core question directly without getting lost in a welter of detail.
In your recent post, you quote me correctly: "Sometimes ad hominem attack is not just acceptable but necessary..."
You then say: "That is not my experience at all. What is your evidence for that claim?"
The last time the United States suffered under a politician as abominable as Trump was in the 1950s when Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was pumping "The Red Scare," attacking all manner of American citizens as "communist agents."
After years of this "reign of terror," Joseph Nye Welch, chief counsel of the U.S. Army - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_N._Welch - made the following ad hominem attack in a congressional hearing, a comment that turned the tide on Trump's "spiritual" forebear, Joseph McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?, said Welch. "Have you left no sense of decency?"
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
This use of ad hominem attack was not a piddling event.
In fact, I cannot recall another moment in post-war America where a single person's comment (to wit, an ad hominem attack) had such momentous -- even salvific -- domestic impact.
Indeed, no other person by dint of his (or her) public political argument has come close to the epochal moment in which Mr. Welch made his ad hominem attack on Joe McCarthy (and McCarthyism), saving America from a bad man with bad ideas and bad policies.
Senator McCarthy's chief legal counsel Roy Cohn taught Trump his "double down on falsehood method":
Sen. Joe McCarthy's Lawyer Roy Cohn Taught Trump To Be A Cutthroat SOB
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/08/sen-joe-mccarthys-lawyer-roy-cohn-who.html
In American jurisprudence, there is significant -- perhaps categorical -- divergence between "criminal law" and "civil law."
In "criminal law" the burden of proof demands demonstration of one's case "beyond reasonable doubt."
In "civil law," the burden of proof is "the preponderance of evidence," a much less exacting standard.
I hold that "criminal law" is analagous to "genuine discussion of the topic in hand," whereas ''civil law" is analagous to ad hominem attack in which the basis of said attack should be "the preponderance of evidence" as perceived in the "informed conscience" of anyone who pays close attention to politics and who knows that "the rules of intellectual rigor" trump the visceral fear-mongering of people who should be attacked ad hominem as an adjunct to rigorous expostulation that finds evidentiary fault with the ideas, policies and ideologies of these reprehensible people.
Concerning your assertion: "I know for a fact that not all of (Trump's followers) are stupid, nor ignorant, nor racist."
Where is your demonstration of proof?
Are any of these "non-ignorant, non-racist" Trump followers willing to "go on record," supplying us with their reasons, rationale and evidence? (If nothing else, I encourage you to ask them. One way or another, their replies will be informative.)
Clearly, the distinction between "stupid" and "ignorant" is a crucial semantic fulcrum.
"Stupid" usually refers to limited "intellectual capacity" whereas "ignorant" means "to ignore."
With astonishing regularity, people who are "not stupid" can be hermetically ignorant.
Carl Jung made a keen observation.
Unlike traditional "Judeo-Christian" moral theology in which a person is not deemed culpable if s/he is unaware of the evil in which s/he participates, Jung argued that all humans have a responsibility to become aware of the moral dimensions in which they live, and that failure to "inform one's conscience" is a morally culpable failure.
I will illustrate Jung's point by brief discussion of "good Germans" in the Third Reich.
These exemplary citizens would never consider themselves racist, nor would their neighbors consider them racists.
Yet "silence is consent" and their "unwitting""witness" to the horrors of the Third Reich made them not only racist sympathizers but made them collaborators in holocaustal mass murder. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/silence+means+consent
"The waters" get very deep, very fast.
At minimum, I argue that ad hominem attack (in which the burden of proof is analogous to the evidentiary burden of "civil law") is an indispensable adjunct to intellectually rigorous "discussion of the topic in hand."
Who knows what might have been different if "the good Germans" had lifted their voices en masse in ad hominem attack on Adolf Hitler?
What I propose "by the light of reason" -- and what I assert from the "preponderance of evidence" -- is that Donald Trump is a very sick man who -- even in the absence of psychiatric diagnosis -- should be decried as an unhinged maniac who constitutes a national security threat of the highest order.
I also assert that those who support him -- however smart they may be -- are willing participants in a white supremacist catastrophe.
I encourage you to invite those Trumpistas whom you "know for a fact" to be neither "stupid, nor ignorant, nor racist" to join this conversation.
I am eager to hear -- first hand -- what they have to say in defense of The Deplorable One.
To begin...
Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
I spend at least 30 hours a week studying American politics and participating in "genuine discussion of the topic at hand" i.e., Donald Trump and his political movement.
However, I also use ad hominem argument.
Why?
Because "character, motive and other attributes" are essential qualities in elected representatives and "character,""motive" and "authority" need to be addressed directly.
Indeed "character" is linchpin in any discussion of political representatives and it is precisely in the domain of character that Trump should be characterized in an ad hominem way. (I am not saying that criticism should be limited to ad hominem "attacks" and I will further comment on this issue below.)
Before detailing some of the "character" traits and "motives" that, by my lights, require categorical condemnation as an adjunct to rigorous elucidation of his insanely irrational, totally random and constantly changing "arguments," let me answer your core question directly without getting lost in a welter of detail.
In your recent post, you quote me correctly: "Sometimes ad hominem attack is not just acceptable but necessary..."
You then say: "That is not my experience at all. What is your evidence for that claim?"
Consider.
The last time the United States suffered under a politician as abominable as Trump was in the 1950s when Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was pumping "The Red Scare," attacking all manner of American citizens as "communist agents."
After years of this "reign of terror," Joseph Nye Welch, chief counsel of the U.S. Army - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_N._Welch - made the following ad hominem attack in a congressional hearing that turned the tide on Trump's "spiritual" forebear, Joseph McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?, said Welch. "Have you left no sense of decency?" https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
This use of ad hominem attack was not a piddling event.
In fact, I cannot recall another moment in post-war America where a single person's comment (to wit, an ad hominem attack) had such momentous -- even salvific -- domestic impact.
Indeed, no other person by dint of his (or her) public political argument has come close to the epochal moment in which Mr. Welch made his ad hominem attack on Joe McCarthy (and McCarthyism), saving America from a bad man with bad ideas and bad policies.
An aside...
Senator McCarthy's chief legal counsel Roy Cohn taught Trump his "double down on falsehood method":Sen. Joe McCarthy's Lawyer Roy Cohn Taught Trump To Be A Cutthroat SOB
Two other points...
In American jurisprudence, there is significant -- perhaps categorical -- divergence between "criminal law" and "civil law."
In "criminal law" the burden of proof is to demonstrate one's case "beyond reasonable doubt."
In "civil law," the burden of proof is "the preponderance of evidence," a much less exacting standard.
I hold that "criminal law" is analagous to "genuine discussion of the topic in hand," whereas ''civil law" is analagous to ad hominem attack in which the basis of said attack is "the preponderance of evidence" as perceived in the "informed conscience" of anyone who pays close attention to politics and who knows that "the rules of intellectual rigor" trump the visceral fear-mongering of people who should be attacked ad hominem as an adjunct to rigorous expostulation that finds evidentiary fault with the ideas, policies and ideologies of these reprehensible people.
Concerning your assertion: "I know for a fact that not all of (Trump's followers) are stupid, nor ignorant, nor racist."
Where is your demonstration of proof?
Are any of these "non-ignorant, non-racist" Trump followers willing to "go on record," supplying us with their reasons, rationale and evidence? (If nothing else, I encourage you to ask them. One way or another, their replies will be informative.)
Clearly the distinction between "stupid" and "ignorant" is a crucial semantic fulcrum.
"Stupid" usually refers to limited "intellectual capacity" whereas "ignorant" means to ignore.
With astonishing regularity, people who are "not stupid" can be hermetically ignorant.
Carl Jung made a crucial observation.
Unlike traditional "Judeo-Christian" moral theology in which a person is not deemed culpable if s/he is unaware of the evil in which s/he participates, Jung argued that all humans have a responsibility to become aware of the moral dimensions in which we live, and that failure to "inform one's conscience" is a morally culpable failure.
I will illustrate Jung's point by brief discussion of "good Germans" in the Third Reich.
These exemplary citizens would never consider themselves racist, nor would their neighbors consider them racists.
Yet "silence is consent" and their "unwitting""witness" to the horrors of the Third Reich made them not only racist sympathizers but made them collaborators in holocaustal mass murder. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/silence+means+consent
"The waters" get very deep, very fast.
At minimum, I argue that ad hominem attack (in which the burden of proof is analogous to the evidentiary burden of "civil law") is an indispensable adjunct to intellectually rigorous "discussion of the topic in hand."
"Left jab, right cross."
Who knows what might have been different if "the good Germans" had lifted their voices en masse in ad hominem attack on Adolf Hitler?
What I propose "by the light of reason" -- and what I assert from the "preponderance of evidence" -- is that Donald Trump is a very sick man who -- even in the absence of psychiatric diagnosis -- should be decried as an unhinged maniac who constitutes a national security threat of the highest order.
I also assert that those who support him -- however smart they may be -- are willing participants in a white supremacist catastrophe.
I encourage you to invite those Trumpistas whom you "know for a fact" to be neither "stupid, nor ignorant, nor racist" to join this conversation.
I am eager to hear -- first hand -- what they have to say in defense of The Deplorable One.
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