Ad Hominem

In debate circles, one of the available tactics to participants is the ad hominem attack -- the personal attack. Rather than deconstructing or attacking your opponent's arguments and assumptions, you simply attack your opponent. You call into question their character, or their intellect, or their religious faith, or their fashion sense, or their personal hygiene, etc.

This tactic has seen a surge of use in authoritarian circles against dissenters of all stripes in the last few years. Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly have made careers out of it. Once their handful of genuine arguments is exhausted, they resort to personal insults. This typically takes the form of questioning the dissenter's patriotism, but occasionally it descends even further into sneering remarks about the social mores of their region of residence, the quality of their haircut, and other non sequiturs.

As debate tactics go, it's quite lame, and says more about the weakness of the attacker's position than of their target. Long-time readers of NetNews are all-too familiar with it, and eventually learn to discount insult-laced screeds out of hand.

That's why I find posts like this disappointing. We are shown a video of President Bush stumbling through yet another unrehearsed public address, and the accompanying copy reads, "See how lame he looks. Wow, that's lame. Must've been painful to have been in the room with all that lameness."

Look, Bush's public speaking skills have always been below par. That's not news. I'm no friend of this President, but the linked post is essentially content-free. It's an ad hominem. It's not even weakly couched inside a broader commentary about immigration policy ("The President's speech about immigration today, which was really lame, spoke of Congress' need to cooperate..."). No, it was just a personal attack, and nothing more. And not even a very good personal attack.

We can do better than that. In fact, we must do better than that. Authoritarians resort to ad hominem because their positions are ethically and logically weak or, quite often, wholly bankrupt. Our positions are strong, well-reasoned, and bolstered by facts. I enjoy the occasional imaginative, well-crafted snark as much as anyone. But, like candy, it should be a lightly-used garnish rather than the whole content. We have the luxury of a wide variety of fine argumentation tools at our disposal. We don't need to reach for that blunt instrument. Put it away.