We need a term for the opposite of ad hominem arguments

An ad hominem attack occurs when a person attacks the character of a person rather than attacking what that person said.  Here’s an example: “Don’t listen to Tommy.  He’s a big fat slob.” This argument is not valid because the attack has nothing to do with the content of Tommy’s…

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Of Values And Victims

Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace.  When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter.  This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.  

I never once thought it was her fault.

How could you?  She’d been deceived.  Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.

History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality.  Especially among adolescents.  We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain.  The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development.  It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely …

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New renegade site: The Art of Mental Warfare

Warning:  The site discussed in this post might be a scam.  Check the comments before doing business with this site.  I visited The Art of Mental Warfare tonight.  It presents itself as a "clarion call to action for an apathetic nation."  The site is based on a book of the same…

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Should Demonstrably Intentional Internet Disinformation be Criminalized?

Okay, perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. But I found some videos on YouTube purporting to show simple homemade tricks for getting power from essentially nothing. The culprit calls himself HouseholdHacker These are very slickly directed and composed, very amateur-looking videos, full of straight-faced monologue and how-to demonstrations, illustrating nothing…

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Internet Aimlessness Can Lead to Odd Treasures

One of my favorite current cartoonists is Brooke McEldowney. I discovered his work online a few years ago in the form of "A Fairy Merry Christmas". In the interest of copyright non-violation, I'll leave it to youse to Google up your own excerpts. This cartoon series was an NEA sponsored…

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