You wouldn’t call someone an “idiot” as an argument

Or a “cunt”

 

But you will call others “bad person”

Or “evil”

Or “greedy”

Or whatever else

 

You’ll recognise an obvious ad hominem, and it’s failure to constitute an argument

You’ll fail to recognise an obvious ad hominem – when you have been conditioned to believe it actually is a good argument

 

And the funny thing is — sometimes ad hominem is kind of not an ad hominem

For example:

Someone can genuinely be too unintelligent to understand a given concept

You’re not going to teach a monkey socialism… OR CAPITALISM. It just wants its fucking banana

 

I actually think we shouldn’t commit the reverse-ad-hominem = be too reluctant to label someone.

A label can be a great compression. It’s a ready, simplified model of reality. It will often perform better, and definitely more efficiently — than you trying to figure it out from the ground up

Of course it will also very, very often massively overcompress the matter, and destroy the signal

 

Still,

your main problem is ad hominem, that you don’t even understand to be ad hominem

When someone calls someone “evil” or a “bad person” — it should instantly set off a red light,

This is PROBABLY NOT a case of productive compression, heuristic

 

Indeed, the whole concept of good and evil is quite nebulous and vague

I’m pretty confident you never attempted to define much of it at all.

It is something that most interests you when it’s an opportunity to gloat in your own self-righteousness, or minimise the anxiety caused by what others are doing, good or bad

 

 

So understand what is an ad-hominem, and actually get over it

Then, understand when to consciously use such heuristic, compression,

And of course justify it duly, so that it actually is more than an ad hominem, so that it actually adds signal and clarity, rather than compresses it and distorts it