Comments on: Cute typo

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 06:44:00 +0000

Ahem, I don’t think Nyere’s "African socialist" communes bore any relation to anything Sir Nicholas Kaldor ever thought, did or said. But it hardly matters seeing as you’ve reverse-Godwinned yourself anyway.

By: john b

john b — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 03:20:00 +0000

So is Milton Friedman. You fucking idiot. Have deleted your other comment, since it’s even more disgusting than these ones and completely off-topic.

By: rebbiker

rebbiker — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 23:36:00 +0000

How remiss of me for forgetting to mention that the LSE’s economy-wrecking Hungarian duo (lets call them Buddha and Pest)were Jews, just like so many of Harold Wilson’s ennobled ‘supporters’.

By: rebbiker

rebbiker — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 21:39:00 +0000

The LSE? What superb advisers their Leftist professors make. Profs Balogh and Kaldor gave Britain’s 60s Labour government such sound economic advice that Denis Healey had to call in the IMF.These two maladroit Magyars also advised many post-colonial African ‘governments’ and,surefire Black failure notwithstanding, hastened the economic decline of places like Marxoid Tanzania.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 09:54:00 +0000

Alex: Yes, that would be useful, but there is a sort of thrill of besting an opponent using an argument you know to be as flimsy as the proverbial house of cards. As he whimpers on the floor, gently rocking while tears run down his face in an unspoken acknowledgment of his inferiority, you have the double pleasure both of watching his pain, and knowing that you skated so close to the edge that it could easily have been you lying there, beaten, like a dog.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 09:24:00 +0000

I've always thought there ought to be debating error messages: "You have made Error 100: Ad Hominem. Please press the "sorry" button on your brain and try again" or "101: Your intervention contained an unsupported assertion. Please refer to the source and try again".

Obviously Godwin would be one; I'd assign the time-honoured 404 to him. But the most useful would be: Error 0. Your argument is just incredibly fucking stupid.

By: David

David — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 07:49:00 +0000

"The Christian Right is neither" would be an example of an ad-homonym attack.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 07:21:00 +0000

They’ve corrected it now.

By: john b

john b — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 07:04:00 +0000

Auto-spellcheck, illiterate transcriber, or zealous editor - who can say...?

I'd add this to the Infidels explanation, though. Most memorably illustrated by Larry's example of the apparently objective argument for nudist schools being made by a known paedophile....

By: chris

chris — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 06:56:00 +0000

For those that are interested I believe that Davies was referring to an Argumentum ad hominem. I would imagine that the spell checkers had a hissy fit and provided the error.

This site is excellent for info on Logic & Fallacies

http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#hominem