• Whiskey Pickle@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Ad hominem

      Ad hominem (Latin for ‘to the person’), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a term that refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion to some irrelevant but often highly charged issue. The most common form of this fallacy is “A makes a claim x, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument x is wrong”.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        The fact that you linked the description of ad hominem here just further underscores my point. Ad hominem would be me making a personal insult as a way to discredit your argument. Being made fun of is not ad hominem. In all seriousness though, there’s nothing funny about having poor reading comprehension skills. Perhaps spend some time working on that instead of trolling here.

        • Whiskey Pickle@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Moving the Goalposts

          Moving the goalposts is an informal fallacy in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded. That is, after an attempt has been made to score a goal, the goalposts are moved to exclude the attempt. The problem with changing the rules of the game is that the meaning of the result is changed, too.

            • Whiskey Pickle@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Sealioning

              Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of “incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate”, and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called “the most apt description of Twitter you’ll ever see”.