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TWO_RUDE

                                            September 17, 2021

                                            From material originally published
                                            at the dailykos in 2015.

                                                                TWO_GATES
Argumentum Adversum Krugman

Paul Krugman has had a number of exchanges with people who
want to accuse him of "ad hominem" argument-- he's not
always polite to the Very Serious People, and many people
seem to use "argumentum ad hominem" to mean "mommy, he was
rude to me!".
   
A notable occasion arose after he wrote a column              
referring to Paul Ryan as "The Flim-Flam Man".              
He responded in a blog post titled "Ad what?":  
           
      http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/ad-what/
                                                                      
   "As I've always understood it, ad hominem attacks involve attacking        
   the person in general rather than what the person has to say on a           
   specific issue. ... I did point out that Ryan appears to be faking          
   it in the selling of his plan-- and I documented that assertion with        
   specifics on the plan, on how he gamed the CBO process, and on the          
   differences between how he talks about the deficit and what his plan        
   would actually do."                                                         
                                                                               

In the comments, sblundy of Boston states it succinctly:                      

   "That's how I understood it. An ad hominem attack means to attempt
   to discredit an argument by asserting that the arguer as
   despicable. You tend to discredit arguments and then conclude that
   the arguer is despicable."


And Jean Baptiste Botul of Paraguay gets to the point that
I've been making here about using different standards in the 
initial engagment:

   "... though ad hominems are fallacious in that they're not
   universally valid, they can be highly reliable inferences that
   lead to true conclusions a lot of the time."


There's a funny quirk to this business, by the way: If you say "don't
listen to him, he engages in 'ad hominem' attacks", that in itself is
an ad hominem argument.



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