Take the body?

That's an old NHL term of art for putting an opponent into the boards: take the body. In discourse it (ad hominem) refers to attacking the person as opposed to the argument. That is a logical fallacy (unless one is arguing on Usenet where it's a logical necessity).

Beck makes the case for attacking the person once the argument has been disposed of. I tend to agree, but Mrs. McP is always insisting that I rein it in. I'm afraid that her best efforts have turned up precious little in results, although I am notorious for sometimes restraining myself preternaturally when I actually find the argument interesting and important. But with some people* I argued for far too long not to have developed the rather brusque air of a consumer advocate toward both their output and their person.

* If there is a more desperately concocted academic mind, held together with popsicle sticks and bubble gum, than that one, it must belong to Ward Churchill.

Comments

As I pointed out to the Professor many times: if he refused to even recognize that he had a just claim to his own life, how could I possibly take anything he had to say seriously. He claimed that reality was a social construct. So I viewed him as a social phenomenon, and condemned him as I would a crime wave or a pornographic film shown at the local high school.

Over in Usenet at this moment, I'm dealing with someone who has essentially argued that a life is not a life. There's a new twist, I told him, on the law of identity. He could be one of the Professor's students. See: a social phenomenon that must be condemned. Not just an argument about ideas; a failure to get above the Mendoza line to where an actual argument or a real idea could be had. *That* is a characterological problem, not an intellectual one, so why waste too much time dealing with the intellectual stump as if it mattered? The fact is that the guy is standing in a classroom *teaching* ruin. It's a public health problem, mental hygeine division.
Further to that, why should I, in the midst of a multi-directional (you know, roundtable) discussion, sit quietly and listen to someone make an explicitly Marxist argument about economics or history? How many hours does one have in a day or a lifetime? I've certainly performed yoeman work in examining such arguments, but *come* *on.* Ad hominem is argumentation by other means, precisely the way war is politics by other means. At some point you have to stop and just throw the bleedin' wanker off the carousel.

That doesn't mean that arguments into which such ideas have unwittingly seeped need be treated as explicit demonstrations of fraud, but for those that are explicitly corrupt (like our friend the Professor's defense of states like North Korea and Iran as feeling "threatened") the argument and the arguer must be labeled as what they are. If it all eventually leads to actual war (because "communication between the parties broke down") well, then, that's probably precisely where it needed to lead. I'd take exactly the same position toward some businessman who claimed that he had a "right" to dump ten thousand gallons of bull urine into the river. He can drink the urine at gunpoint for all I care about his "argument."
Anonymous said…
I'm "Rich," and I've got a related entry at:

http://uncommonsense.typepad.com/root/2005/03/tried_by_fire.html
I read your post, Rich, and I particularly liked your point about the "sophistic" rhetorical methods of lawyers. In general I hold back on the potty language, though not completely and forever. I'm more inclined to use lumber of a slightly different cut to smack a foot-dragging interlocuter. From two days ago, "You're like a tiresome old lady standing over her teapot waiting for it to boil without ever having lit the flame."

That was directed toward someone who I generally refer to as "sullen and inert," and to his method of argument as "prep school cheek."

To describe an exchange with him as "tiresome" is to put a nice face on it. It's more like following a mole around through his tunnel and then listening while he eats his grubs. I never initiate discussion with him, but always find him first showing up with sullen resentments behind something I've posted. But I always try to treat everyone as an individual, even when their individuality seems to have disappeared.

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