Modifying Class Object

[Alf P. Steinbach]

* Steven D'Aprano:
> On Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:04:08 +0100, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
> 
>> You thought you cold do a bit of ad hominem attack.
> 
> That phrase you keep using, "ad hominem"... it doesn't mean what you seem 
> to think it means.
> 
> An ad hominem attack is not when somebody makes a criticism of you 
> personally. It is when somebody says something along the lines of "Don't 
> pay any attention to Alf, he doesn't know what he's talking about, he's a 
> <whatever>".

<url: http://www.tfd.com/ad+hominem>
ad hominem Latin [æd ˈhɒmɪˌnɛm]
adj & adv
1. directed against a person rather than against his arguments
2. based on or appealing to emotion rather than reason Compare ad rem See also 
argumentum ad hominem



> You might not like the personal criticism, but that doesn't make it 
> either an attack or a fallacy.

Steve Holden attacked only at the personal level, via characterization.

In response to ...

 > >> No idea. Nothing I know of can solve it [failure of article propagation].
 >
 > Not sure, but perhaps it's possible to mail directly to gmane?

... Steve Holden wrote:

<quote>
Is there *any* problem you don't have a fatuous answer for?
</quote>

Which doesn't have anything to do with any subject matter discussed, not even 
the PS that he was replying to (which absolutely didn't warrant that description 
or any negative response), but which does convey an impression of a person.

Then he wrote

<quote>
you assumed you knew better than Stephen [Hansen]
</quote>

which again is only about a person, and here about the person's motivations for 
trying to help.

And there was a bit more with some collateral damage in the implications.

It's pretty dirty and yes, personal attacks are ad hominem; see above.

The ad hominem attacks that he appears to routinely engage in reflect back on 
Steve Holden but the sub-threads that they invariably spawn also constitute a 
high level of noise deflecting from whatever issue was discussed.



Cheers & hth. (especially the dictionary reference),

- Alf

PS: in order to recognize various forms of fallacies the following is a quite 
useful resource: <url: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/>. I just typed 
"fallacies" in the Firefox address bar. - DS