Monday 8 December 2014

Working in Montréal today --ad hominem refute

Good morning folks,

I am working in Montréal today, Ottawa on Wednesday and not working at all on Friday.  Please be sure to mark in your calendars, I may quiz you later.

Have you ever woke up and realized that you lost an argument that you didn't know that you were in?  You may have been the victim of the best of conversational terrorisms, the fallacious and unfair arguments.

Top of the food chain is the ad hominem attack, literally against the man.  This is where the opposing side does not address questions of fact or applicability but instead attacks the speaker.

Yeah, well you wouldn't understand this, it is way above your head even though you think you are an expert on everything.  Moreover, you are a big doo doo head.

There are many variants of this, but you get the idea.  The next are the slight of mind tricks.  These could be arguments against the structure of your data and method of presenting, the context or introducing a new argument from somewhere past the short stop in left field.

What precisely do you mean by ending your argument with 'of'?  You mentioned circumcision how long have you been antisemitic? 

There are the straw-man arguments as well, this is where the speaker presents an argument that you did not actually make and then attacks it.  If they are careful they can even lure you down a road that is close to hell.

You stated that you believe in free elections but in this country our right to vote originates in land ownership.  I don't see how any system that purposefully excludes citizens that cannot afford to buy a house and must rent from participating in our elections is at all fair and I question your logic on that issue and this and put it back to you how it was fair to exclude and marginalized such a large segment of the population.

You have no doubt been the recipient of the bombastic refute.  This usually involves an amplified response involving much hand waving and a litany of previously undisclosed facts or fictions that if they were true or relevant should have been part of the original argument.

It's like a cop arguing for a warrant with only vague circumstantial evidence but countering the denial with claims of dozens of witnesses.

The brain seizure is always fun as well..

Well what you have implied is different from your inference,  I suggest that you decide if we are going to discuss this in a procedural or structural framework or at the very minimum agree on the dialectic rules, does that sound fair?

Damn, there are so many more invalid argument types, but the plane is on final approach, out of time.   Please feel free to post your own in the comments section.

Have a great Monday and a great week!

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