Bozos on the bus…

What do you do when you want to criticize a blogger for the way they behave? How do you name another’s condition? Over the years in on-line communications, from usenet through chatrooms, the blogs and IM, two limiting clichés have dominated discussion. The first and more important is Godwin’s law. Godwin’s law has been so misinterpreted as to deny all legitimate discussion of fascist trends in global commerce and social organization… bring up the Nazis and lose the argument. Period. This is very good for the global corporate empires and their government partners.

Godwin’s law is really about civility. It sets a boundary on how an argument can be framed, and it limits the most powerful historical comparisons and arguments by analogy. It’s a bullshit law and it ought to be repealed.

The second noisome cliché that ought to be readdressed is the pitiful bow to convention we make when we deny the value of the ad hominem argument.

An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: “argument to the person”, “argument against the man”) consists of replying to an argument by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument. It is most commonly used to refer specifically to the ad hominem abusive, or argumentum ad personam, which consists of criticizing or personally attacking an argument’s proponent in an attempt to discredit that argument.

It is absolutely true that there are pig-people among us, walking on their two hind legs and living lives of self-centered greed, people in the public eye who claim a privilege themselves in argument by asserting their own authority. Then there are people with other personality flaws and defects — the passive-aggressives, the narcissists, the people with crossed eyes and big ears. I claim the right to call a pig a pig, to decline to mud wrestle.

In the psychoanalytic theory of transactional analysis, many types of passive-aggressive behavior are interpreted as “games” with a hidden psychological payoff, and are classified into stereotypical scenarios with names like “See What You Made Me Do” and “Look How Hard I’ve Tried”. Other types of passive-aggressive behaviors can be described by names like “You Forgot to do that on Purpose, Didn’t you” or “I Don’t want to be treated like this, do you?”

Say a pig person were to claim, “The earth moves around the sun.” I find it a necessary and sufficient argument to say, “Well perhaps, but you ARE a pig.” The ban on ad hominem arguments, like Godwin’s law, can result in an excess of civility at the expense of truth and justice. Care to argue with me?

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