AD HOMINEM AND THE CLEAR-L CHARTER

      I have wanted to place an item in the clear-l/a.c.t charter on the
subject of ad hominem for a long time, but have hesitated due to the
difficulty of getting a clear definition of it.

      Many people for example confuse ad hominem with descriptive name
calling.  As much as some may not like being called names such as
dilletante, name calling has nothing at all to do with ad hominem.

      Ad Hominem is the specific effort to belittle the truth of an
assertion by pointing out generally negative *IRRELEVANT* qualities of
the being making the assertion.

      For example I say "I have discovered that water freezes at 32
degress Farenheit" and Phil says, "No way, Homer is a drug addict and
child molester, looks at kiddie porn all day long on the net."

      You see its just not relevant.

      Saying that Carol is wrong BECAUSE she is a dilletante in the
subject is ad hominem for sure, but saying Carol is a dilletante because
she is unstudied and thus might be wrong in the subject is not.

      Now let's take Phil for instance.  Almost the totality of his
postings on this group depend on ad hominem in one way or another, when
he can't get agreement about how wrong the tech is on a technical basis,
he starts bringing up supposed character flaws in the originator of the
tech, as if they had anything to do with the truth of the matter.

      Worse he lies and fabricates about what the originator said, for
example by repeatedly bringing up the little fat boy with a bugle being
blown out of a volcano.  Hubbard never said such a thing and Phil knows
it, but he has already lost the argument using forthright reason, so he
reverts to ad hominem and then outright lying by trying to make Hubbard
look so ridiculous and pathetic that no one would believe a word he
said.

      *NO ONE* is as bad as Phil tries to make Hubbard out to be.

      Now sometimes things like excessive drug, alcohol or medicine use
can be relevant to the results of a man's work, so when we are told
Hubbard was doing drugs of one sort or another while doing OT III on
himself, it becomes relevant.  NOT AS A WAY TO TOTALLY DISCOUNT THE
INCIDENT THOUGH.  But like all incidents run under drugs, they need to
be re run straight to make sure all charge is gone, and various parts of
the story or date/locate might change.

      If you take a look at the Pilot's work on Incident's I and II, and
El Kin's work on the I, II and III, you will see a very different
approach to the matter than Phil's which is brazenly disgraceful.

      Phil talks much about personal integrity and decency, but delivers
little himself.

      Now you see that statement is not ad hominem, it is my opinion
about Phil.

      When I managed the ADORE-L list, we had one rule, called the 50/50
rule.  50 percent flame must be matched by 50 percent content.

      Flame was anything that was not content which included name
calling, ad hominem and even praise.

      For example if I say someone is a great thinker, or I say someone
is a stupid idiot, what's the difference.  Neither says anything of
importance.  Both are hype, pure flame, one is positive flame and one is
negative flame.

      When Carol says,

      "All that comes from God is good,
       Man came from God,
       Man is not all good."

      and I call Carol an illogical nitwit, you see that is not ad
hominem, that is descriptive name calling.

      When she says 'syllogisms never did much for me', and I say no
wonder you engage in 'female logic' all the time, again its descriptive
name calling.

      We have a right to call the insane insane, and to call a meatball a
meatball.  Meatball's don't like being called meatballs because they
know its right.

      What we don't have a right to do, is claim that Roland's
exteriorization was false because he plays with his pud twice a day.
Its just not relevant to the facts under question.

      Roland by the way keeps screaming for proof because he missed proof
in the exteriorization he had.  He already has his proof but can't quite
contact it due to the bad auditing and his own lousy awareness of
things.

      As to what we can do about ad hominem exactly, is we can ban it,
and those guilty of it will simply be retro modded out of existence on
clear-l and our news server.  That's the way we got rid of KP, we retro
modded his postings out of existence on lightlink's news server and he
stopped posting here.

      The banned poster will continue to be able to post, but their
postings will not last on our news server and will not be archived by
the archiving bots, and anyone using our news server to read a.c.t won't
find the postings there if there has been enough time between the
posting and the retro mod action, about once an hour.

      I too consider ad hominem to be vile, it has no earthly purpose or
use except to disgrace oneself to everyone else.  But I will not get
into a polite forum where there is no name calling and no freedom to
call a nitwit a nitwit.

      By the way another very subtle form of ad hominem is to claim that
someone asserts something merely because they were taught it by Hubbard.
People do have their own ideas, sometimes before or after they hear it
from others.

      Trying to make an idea wrong by claiming they got it from another
is a very poisonous form of ad hominem and often is a wrong indication
to boot.

      Comments and suggestions welcome.

      Homer
Mon Oct 27 12:14:36 EDT 2014