Q7. Where is the dividing line between a personal attack
and a factual attack?
This is an excellent question. A personal attack (also known
as an "ad hominem" attack) is where the person that the attacker
is attacking is the recipient of the attack purely because the
attacker doesn't like him or her.
If an author (or a reader making a comment on an article)
wants to say, "Joe Shmoe is dumber than Forest Gump," he or she
must also factually demonstrate how he or she knows this to be
a true fact. Without evidence to back the claim, such a claim
becomes nothing more than a personal attack, which Nolan Chart
LLC frowns upon.
The difficult part about all this, of course, is that some
attacks are borderline in nature. In such cases, it becomes a
judgment call. Nolan Chart LLC's management will decide on a case
by case basis (as necessary) whether a claim of "personal attack"
is valid or not. Rest assured that the basis of our decision will
not be political at all. Rather, it will be based primarily on
what we feel is best for all our readers and authors together,
as well as what is best for the website and for Nolan Chart LLC.
As a company, Nolan Chart LLC takes no positions on any political
issues.
In most cases, Nolan Chart LLC will not intervene unless we have
received a complaint of violation of our terms of service via
the links provided on the article pages themselves. So if you
see something in an article or comment that you think is a
violation and you don't report it, don't automatically blame
us if nothing gets done about it. We can't act on a problem if
we don't know it's there!
Of course, the best way to avoid being accused of engaging
in personal attacks is not to attack other people at all, even
based on the facts. In most cases where someone says something
negative about someone else, even though they can point to facts
to back their claims, it's much better not to make the attack
even just a little personal at all. In other words, instead of
saying that so-and-so shouldn't be supporting such-and-such,
it's generally better to simply say that such-and-such should
not be supported by anyone, without deliberately tying a
particular political opponent to the issue.
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