Re: Thanks, and a Brief Survey

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 13:08 +0100, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> On 15/01/10 17:31, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 10:47 -0500, john palmieri wrote:
> >> You always seem to devolve into ad-hominem, personal attacks.
> >
> > When a person falsely accuses Lefty of putting bias in his surveys THEN
> > you apparently don't need to respond with the ad-hominem bomb??!!
> 
> Huh? If I say "Lefty, you're an idiot", that's ad-hominem, but if I say "Lefty, 
> your survey is biased" it's not.

technically, no; if you were to say "Lefty's survey is biased because
he's an idiot" then *that* would be ad hominem attack; but saying
"Lefty's survey is biased because of <point of bias>" is *not* an ad
hominem attack.

and, though I feel moderately stupid[0] to even have to point this out:
in no case an ad hominem attack on a person allows a third one to reply
with an ad hominem attack.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[0] obviously, I would feel entirely stupid doing so in a normal conses
of people, but the medium does require some special hand-holding. The
medium and some of the subscribers.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi