On Sep 21, 2007, at 9:12 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> I have never, in my 77+ years, met anyone, in person, in print, or in
> cyberspace, so obsessed as is Doug with equating "wrong argument=bad
> person," and who is so incapable of focusing on the argument rather
> than
> the person.
The more I think about this the more ludicrous it seems. In most of my writing and broadcasting, I don't talk very much about personalities. There are a few people I do like to kick around - Stanley Aronowitz and George Gilder come to mind - but it's mostly because I think their arguments and positions are consistently and extravagantly silly. But you'd really have to search a long time to find classically ad hominem analysis.
A listserv is a different thing from a text or a radio broadcast though. It's a social space, and people's positions are inevitably bound up with their personalities and voices. Especially when some people make the same point over & over again - e.g. a certain listmember's agentless view of History, or another's obsession with a phantasmic version of "liberalism."
Doug