"To go in on an ad-homonym attack in the way they have indicates to me a level of desperation…" – the Beeb, transcribing Simon Davies’s quote on ID cards. Hehe.
The actual story is worth reading as well, although you may struggle to contain your anger at Charles Clarke’s levels of hypocrisy, bluster and idiocy. I particularly can’t stand the way that when independent experts produce impartial and high-quality research that gets in the way of the government’s insane dogma (see also: Lancet; Amnesty), the immediate reaction among both the government and its supporters is to spout shit like "the whole episode has discredited the LSE’s reputation".
No, it hasn’t, except in the eyes of bigoted insane fuckjobs who think Tony and his army of cunts can do no wrong. Now fuck off and die of cancer. (via)
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
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….
They’ve corrected it now.
"The Christian Right is neither" would be an example of an ad-homonym attack.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.