Aug. 8, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
02:53
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| So when I'm browsing the comments on my videos, I often see people confuse insults with ad hominems, so I thought I'd do a quick video just to clear up the difference. | |
| I'm happy with the definitions found in the Oxford English Dictionary. | |
| An insult is to speak or treat with disrespect or scornful abuse, normally with the intention of offending that person. | |
| An ad hominem is an argument or reaction directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining. | |
| An ad hominem is fallacious because it doesn't attempt to refute the argument being presented. | |
| It is instead an attack on the person without an attempt to address the merits of their argument. | |
| Let me give you an example. | |
| This is Matt Binder. | |
| If Matt Binder makes the argument literally just maybe a hundred or so years ago 100 and such a few years ago, that women were still viewed as chattel. | |
| The property of men! | |
| Then there are several things that we can say in response. | |
| The first thing that springs to mind is probably that Matt Binder is wrong because he is a scrawny, shrieking, goony-bearded, Lego-haired, lobotomized manlet. | |
| But this is an ad hominem fallacy. | |
| These are not the reasons that Matt Binder is wrong. | |
| All of these observations are of course completely correct, but none of them refute his central argument. | |
| Women were still viewed as chattel! | |
| The best way to directly refute this point is simply to look at the conditions of women in the United States 100 years ago. | |
| For those who don't know history, that's a year into World War I. | |
| We can see by merely looking at propaganda posters that women were not treated as chattel, the physical property of men. | |
| All of the motivational propaganda posters you'll see trying to encourage women to enlist for service in the war treat the women that they are trying to motivate with a great deal of respect. | |
| These women were being recruited via persuasion rather than conscription, and usually included some variant on the phrase until the boys come back. | |
| Women were often paid handsomely for their vital work on the home front, where they staffed factories producing munitions, working for long hours with pay to produce shells for the men at the front. | |
| We could also look at the civil rights of the women at the time to see that women could not only own their own businesses, own property and earn their own money, but two years after World War II they also gained the right to vote. | |
| Put simply, Matt Binder is wrong. | |
| He is in fact so wrong that his statements are a wild and ludicrous distortion of reality. | |
| Matt Binder is so wrong that any schoolchild with a passing knowledge of history should be able to refute his argument. | |
| So when Matt Binder says, Women were still viewed as chattel, and someone calls him a fucking idiot, this is not an ad hominem. | |
| This is an insult. | |
| They are not saying that Matt Binder is wrong because he is a fucking idiot. | |
| They are saying that Matt Binder is a fucking idiot because he is wrong. | |
| And the insult is being given specifically to offend Matt Binder. |
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