Adhominy: If You Don’t, They Will

All too often what will be heretofore referred to as adhominy and adhominous arguments are deemed to be ipso facto invalid, as they ostensibly focus on the person making the argument rather than the substance.

In point of fact, rules of logic notwithstanding, adhominy and adhominous arguments serve several purposes which oftentimes buttress a point in a way that direct logical refutation might not.   Brevity, crucial in the Twitterverse, is always better served by an ostensibly adhominous label, speaking volumes without excessive verbiage.  As in: drawing a historical analog between powerful people appeasing hateful underlings, elevating them to positions of power under the guise of keeping them “under control” while using them as a cover for one’s own truer darker political impulses.

Hence: #NancyVonPapen.  

Additionally, labeling an opponent often serves to undermine a false premise, or several: one can invalidate both an argument and arguer simultaneously: nothing can be more devastating than a curt “you’re wrong AND you have no standing to make that assertion” with a hashtag, especially if an antagonist can be forced to either dig further in support of an unpopular position and be tied to it in perpetuity, or abandon it completely and have a lifetime of work erased. 

Hence: #AlexandriaOcastroCowfart.  

We live in an adversarial culture run by the court of public opinion—and like “real court”, juries are emotionally swayed by “arguments” that are extra-legal, or extra-logical, and are still valid, if only post-facto.  One would be well advised to keep a quiverfull of adhominous arrows.  As “ridicule is man's most potent weapon”, one can always expect no less from one’s opponent: if you don’t “freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”, they will.  

Additionally—contra Alinsky—the price of a successful attack is not always a constructive alternative (as can be evidenced by his own previous assertion that “if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside”); often the negation accomplished by said “successful attack” is ipso facto the constructive alternative: to stand athwart something yelling “Stop”, until it does.  The difference in the case of adhominy is that the “Stop!!” is often accompanied by a “you ______ !!!”, but it might make the tactic more effective (and what could be more bipartisan than a marriage between Buckley and Alinsky?)

It is also crucial to note making adhominous argument or even labeling an opponent cannot and should not be an expression of “hate”—even if it’s belittling—unless it’s direct incitement.  Granted, calling an adhominous argument “hateful” is in itself an effective adhominous tactic, effective because it often works; however, on both logical and adhominous grounds, it can be often parried in an almost akaido-like manner: which one of us is taking this personally, and which one of us is really engaging in “hate”?  

Which, tangentially, is why the argument that the vitriol being leveled at Jussie Smollett for his hoax—by a usually salient source that has no truck with intersectional identity politics—is wrong.

Daniel Payne writes:

“[W]hat Smollett did was terrible. No, there was no excuse for it. Yes, he should suffer consequences for it. But you do not have to hate him for it, and in fact there is great virtue in taking pity on him. He is in a lonely, miserable place right now, set apart from the rest of us, staring down a very dark path and facing a lifetime of awful repercussions.  You could do worse things than feel compassion for a man so beset by colossal stupidity and monumental suffering. The world is never in need of more anger. Hating Jussie Smollett will not solve anything at all. And feeling sorry for him will not hurt anything.”

Payne, who is definitely not trying to either excuse Smollett nor engage in adhominy in any direction, still confuses not having compassion and being angry with “hate”.   This “hate”—if it exists—is ancillary and possibly irrelevant, and injecting it in to the conversation as the inevitable result of a perceived “lack of compassion” actually aggravates the offense and  cover up.  In fact, there is a “great” lack “of virtue in taking pity” on an offender who refuses to acknowledge wrongdoing and makes use of his family, friends and a sympathetic media to make his case; "feeling sorry for him will not hurt anything" except for the credibility of future victims, to which Smollett has already caused immeasurable hurt; "the world is never in need of more anger", except when the fear of righteous anger might serve as a deterrent to this offense being repeated elsewhere.  

Finally, Smollett “staring down a very dark path and facing a lifetime of awful repercussions” is not necessarily the most likely outcome: has Payne forgotten the examples of Jayson Blair and Jackie Coakley?  

Hence: #JussieBlair? 

#JussieCoakley?