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I notice that when people are debating an issue it's common for someone to focus on the person(s) debating while ignoring the actual issue. It doesn't matter what the issue is, it almost always becomes about the people debating and less about the actual issue. I see it happening in real life and on the internet. It's become so common many of use get sucked into it, yours truly included. Occupy Wall Street became more about the hygiene and moral character of the occupiers and less about Wall Street.
It's called ad-hominem. When you try to invalidate somebodies argument based on something unrelated.
And everybody on here and in real life does it... Some more (a lot) than others. It happens because everybody is "bigoted" in some regard when it comes to social issues. And social issues are nothing but people debating their preferences.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Frugality
I notice that when people are debating an issue it's common for someone to focus on the person(s) debating while ignoring the actual issue. It doesn't matter what the issue is, it almost always becomes about the people debating and less about the actual issue. I see it happening in real life and on the internet. It's become so common many of use get sucked into it, yours truly included. Occupy Wall Street became more about the hygiene and moral character of the occupiers and less about Wall Street.
Even though it's really tempting to go ad hominem (attack to the person), especially when someone is being unreasonable, it's really not productive and is an argumentative fallacy that's related to a red herring. As you mention, it also involves stasis shifting or shifting the topic. Full disclosure: I've been guilty of it myself.
That said, just because it is tempting and might give us a temporary sense of one-up-personship, I think we should try to avoid it, especially online where it's easy to be insulting. Along with other fallacies of argument, it's really poisonous to democratic deliberation. I'm not saying that places like C-D should be filled with kumbaya moments, but rather that there would be more light and less heat generated if people could focus on the issues at hand.
The example of OWS is a good one--demonizing the protestors prevented people from thinking about the things that were being protested against.
People that do that are losers and intellectual midgets. They can't address the topic, so they shift the focus.
That is often true, yet sometimes the OP itself is only a thinly veiled ad hominem. Those are the ones that puzzle me. They also make me grateful for alert mods.
Personally, I try not to descend to personal screeds like Interbred or whatever his name is, above.
I think when you see the same poster(s) posting the same misinformation over and over and over again as 'fact', even when it's been debunked multiple times you can get frustrated and lash out a bit.
I've seen the same website, the same information usually by the same posters in different threads and it is continually proven false so they'll just wait until another thread pops up and post it again.
The example of OWS is a good one--demonizing the protestors prevented people from thinking about the things that were being protested against.
It's a good example of ad-hominem. But it was justifiably attacked because, as witnessed, many of those protesters had no idea what they were protesting against.
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