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A comment on Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics. Parent comment

Re:Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics by wutbrodo on Thursday June 23, 2022 @06:04PM (#31855690)
None of the lines of reasoning were an ad hominem. From your other comment[1], it seems like you think "ad hominem" just means "being rude to someone". I recommend reading the GP comment's description of ad hominem again: it means making a logical argument that depends on the speaker's personal characteristics.

"You're European, so your argument is biased and wrong" is an ad hominem. "Your argument is naive, here's why I think that" is not. The latter is logically downstream of the argument, while the former is upstream.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31854644

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Re:Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics by clairity on Thursday June 23, 2022 @06:40PM (#31855979)
no, an ad hominem need not be literal. do you really not understand nuance in language? we're not computers operating only on singular data and deterministic instructions.

see how those three sentences go together? that's a line of reasoning. the subject comment doesn't have that throughline. it's disjointed; the parts are only tangentially connected.

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Re:Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics by wutbrodo on Friday June 24, 2022 @06:54PM (#31870540)
> no, an ad hominem need not be literal

What on earth do you mean by "literal" here? Ad hominem refers to a specific fallacious style of argumentation. Being ignorant of the definition and then too stubborn to admit it is not pushing back against "overliteralism".

Especially because the rest of your comment (dismissing the rest of the argument due to "ad hominem") only makes sense if one assumes the correct definition!

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Re:Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics by lovich on Friday June 24, 2022 @03:36AM (#31858758)
But an ad hominem requires that the argument is thrown out solely based on the attack against the person. Laying out a logical argument against someone's belief, and then _additionally_ insulting him based on his beliefs is not an ad hominem.
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