Comment by TimTheTinker
6 days ago
It's not ad-hominem to say a bunch of comments are ad-hominem (or if it is, how do you characterize your comment?).
I'll concede my second remark was unhelpful, since such remarks are best expressed in private with friends (if at all). It wasn't intended as an argument or a personal attack... more as a lament.
but it is ad-hom to say the authors of those comments are "unable to argue logically", "unable to see things from other positions". I didn't say you are unable to post better comments, I'm just annoyed that you didn't.
That you and the parent comment, and the sibling comment, are doing the "pat ourselves on the back for being cleverer than the morons posting here with THEIR stupid ideas and THEY don't even know we're laughing at them! :D :D :D" empty back-patting which can be seen by people on all sides of all kinds of topics. In almost every thread on 4chan, in many Usenet discussions of certain programming languages, on YouTube vaccination videos posted by anti-vax people, in the comments of tabloid news articles on immigrants. Atheists are patting themselves on the back about how they are laughing at all the religious people, and religious people are patting themselves on the back about how they see the truth and the idiots will only learn when they are burning in Hell.
Lament that this type of thing is endemic on the internet, used to be scarce on HN, and now isn't.
> pat ourselves on the back for being cleverer than the morons posting here with THEIR stupid ideas and THEY don't even know we're laughing at them! :D :D :D
Ouch, that's quite the misunderstanding. I'm certainly not glad about my observation, and not proud of my position relative to other people's. (And as you pointed out, I wasn't posting helpfully - that's not something to be proud of either.)