I've always appreciated Carrol's arguments in this regard. Long time ago, Doug was under attack at Femecon list. He'd written to support Ehrenreich's work on maids, part of which contained an argument as to why feminists were doing it wrong. The feminists at the femecon list were critical of her argument, so they turned on Doug and started demanding that he explain how he, a man, had a right to speak to the issue. He was probably well off with that book on the stock market; money out the hooha from investments. And besides, he probably didn't scrub is own toilet, so how dare he support Ehrenreich's arguments.
Katha Pollit was involved as well and somehow someone decided that it was important to red bait her. Whatever she had to say couldn't be taken seriously: she was a commie symp.
Carrol described this as unethical discourse: poisoning the wells. It works, he said, on people like Katha Pollit because she isn't a commie. Someone like me or Carrol. Call us commies? Our response should be: yeah, isn't it nice. But for Katha, she's stuck between a rock and a hard place. Carrol wrote:
>"baiting is sometimes effective when used against a principled
>non-communist opponent, for she is trapped between two unwelcome choices:
>for if she (truthfully) denies (the charge), she gives implicit assent to
>an unethical mode of discourse, while to ignore or accept the charge is
>also to give implicit assent to a lie. Thus the tactic sometimes works
>simply by creating that commonplace situation in which the lie is simple,
>the correcting truth complex and long-winded."
But I think the key is: opponent.
As Carrol has pointed out here, though I can't find the post at the mo', the use of logical fallacies against people who aren't opponents is an attack on solidarity.
When arguments are attacked by focusing on the personal faults and quirks of the individual, a situation is set up whereby people's opinions of the individual making the argument are shaped by poisoning wells. Suggest that the problem is that the person making an argument is crazy, irrationally devoted to some cause, delusional, short and suffering from napolean complex, whatever.
When that sort of attack continues, when people implicitly support it by saying nothing -- something like happened to some second wave feminists like Jo Freeman -- then it becomes a form of trashing. As Freeman and others have shown in their autobios and scholarly examinations of events, people don't survive attacks on their persons. If it's a personality flaw or some character trait that's attacked, you can't defend yourself in the way Carrol explained above. A person doesn't recover very easily from that sort of thing. So, it's possibly good to use it if you want to smear a person and you don't consider them an ally.
If the attack is on the argument, though, you can always improve your argument when others criticize it. It's not about you, but the argument.
Unethical discourse against opponents? Might work. Used against comrades? Creates strife, destroys solidarity.
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)