Poopyheads

For centuries we've known about logical fallacies: breakdowns in logic where the wheels come off and you spin out of control.  These are well known, and in a less degraded age were taught at the University to generations of intellectuals.

Perhaps the most famous of these is the argumentum ad hominem, the argument against the person, not against his argument.  The easiest way to demonstrate this is by an example that we all learned before we even got to the school ground:

Child 1: It's my turn to play on the swing.

Child 2: You're a poopyhead!

Child 2 has lost the argument, at least by the recognized rules of logic.

The best argument that the left has lost its way - that there are no longer any competent thinkers among their ranks - is the resort to ad hominem argument.  Juan Williams just learned this the hard way, as he says in those exact words:



Most telling in the entire exchange is the CEO of NPR not saying that he's wrong, but that he needs therapy.  Juan's a poopyhead!

What I find striking about this is how similar it is to what we see in the "scientific" debate about Global Warming.  You're a denier!

Scientific American just ran an article that appears to be an attempt to step back a bit from the edge of the cliff, back towards scientific objectivity.  It appears to be, but in their attempt, they manage to insult Judy Curry, one of the most respected scientists in the field:

I was very disappointed to read erroneous information, in an otherwise very informative article, in the Scientific American by Michael D. Lemonick titled

Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues

which seeks to isolate Judy Curry as being an outlier from her climate science colleagues [the article, of course, is useful in that it does expose the attempt by some to marginalize anyone who differs from the IPCC viewpoint, and Michael Lemonick is commended for doing that].
The text in his article, however, includes the header of one of its sections which implies she is gone

“Over to the Dark Side“.

Mind you, this is in an article that appears to be striving for objectivity.  Dr. Curry is not one of those "deniers" - she's been clear that she thinks that we are warming the planet substantially via greenhouse gases.  The article excerpted is by Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., who also believes that we are warming the planet.  However, both Pielke and Curry have been vocal in demanding better, more transparent science from the IPCC in particular.

The response? They've gone over to the Dark Side.  In other words, they're poopyheads.

If NPR were confident in its positions, they wouldn't have felt the need to argue ad hominem against Williams.  If the climate science community were confident in its results and conclusions, they wouldn't argue ad hominem against scientists that fundamentally agree with the conclusions but think that the science is shoddy.

And there's the rub, and the rationale for the ad hominem.  Williams explicitly says that liberals think that a Black man can only be a down-the-line liberal.  Curry must have been corrupted by evil forces, because she "used to be one of the climate establishment."

Heresy is different from slander.  Slanderers are jailed; heretics are burned.