Cpl Kendall wrote:Anyone can employ compartmentalization. It's not a difficult concept and often happens without thought.
It also tends to break down without thought. Sometimes spectacularly, which gets covered in the little corners of the news, such as the myspace suicides, item rage assaults, or fire mage wannabes; more often in little small ways.
People need to be able to focus on what's being said, not how it's said.
Assaults on character, rants, and similar rude behavior are rarely strictly a
how; they're a
what. Ann Coulter does not simply disagree with her chosen opponents; she says that they're all idiots. That's not just a method of stating her points, that's an assertion in and of itself.
There's nothing wrong with calling a person an idiot if he is in fact an idiot.
The person being called an idiot is almost never an actual idiot; indeed, even when someone is actually an idiot, calling them an idiot is insensitive at best, which is why nomenclature has shifted to "profound mental retardation."
That might be the case if you actually cracked down on the practice of employing dishonest tactics by the members. So far everything's gone round in circles because of that.
I noticed the "Starfleet military vs. RL military" thread was going in circles, but as noted above, I attribute that not to argumentative fallacy, but people starting to lose their tempers and get on edge with one another.
The only thing similarity to Coulter found in the VS debate is the fanatics.
If this is true, then there are a great many fanatics visible in the VS debate.
No and neither are you.
Perhaps I have been lax lately. Should I step up enforcement? We have far fewer rules than any of the other boards dealing with this topic. I've let quite a bit of incidental rudeness not directed towards anybody in particular slide, and I probably have
not been remembering all the old warnings given to frequently inactive members.
And once again that's only part of the issue, there is the dishonesty to take into account.
Genuine dishonesty - not simply someone disagreeing with you in a manner you dislike - is usually a feature of active trolling. Which is actually covered under our rules.
I have seen no definitive signs of deliberate dishonesty from you or your opponents.
An ad hominen is a warrentless personal attack. If you call someone a name while passing on information at the same time, it's not an Ad Hominen.
It is indeed an
ad hominem attack, and further by the nature of communication an instance of one or another flavor of
ad hominem fallacy regardless of whatever else is bundled with it.