Jay’s Law

April 18, 2025 • 9:15 am

Jay Tanzman sent me a note after he’d read several posts excoriating antiwoke writers who agree with views similar to ours.  And it’s true: these days online denigration often takes the form of finding an association between someone you want to demonize and somebody who’s already demonized. Once you do that, there’s no need to deal with actual issues.  Here’s Jay’s Law, which is his.

Here it comes.

It’s coming soon.

Here it is:

Ad hominem is the new skepticism.

21 thoughts on “Jay’s Law”

    1. Ad hominem is the argument of choice among retards of every political persuasion. (Oops).

  3. To elaborate on ad hominem argumentation:

    In their book The Canceling of the American Mind (2023), Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott have analyzed a fashionable style of argumentation which they call the “perfect rhetorical fortress“:

    Inside its walls lie layer after layer of argumentative dodges, ad hominem diversions, and rhetorical defenses that protect those inside from ever having to address the substance of their opponent’s arguments. We call it the “Perfect” Rhetorical Fortress because using its full power allows you to divert or derail any possible debate.

    The key factor that makes these dodges so effective is optionality: you are never obligated to use them. You can apply the barricades to dismiss arguments you don’t like, while letting other people just waltz through. (Chapter 6)

    Dismiss arguments you don’t like for any one or for a combination of these reasons:

    Barricade 1: Is the Speaker Conservative?
    Barricade 2: What’s the Speaker’s Race?
    Barricade 3: What’s the Speaker’s Sex?
    Barricade 4: What’s the Speaker’s Sexuality?
    Barricade 5: Is the Speaker Trans or Cis?
    Barricade 6: Can the speaker be accused of being “phobic”?
    Barricade 7: Are They Guilty by Association?
    Barricade 8: Did the Speaker Lose Their Cool?
    Barricade 9: Did the Speaker Violate a “Thought Terminating Cliché”? (for instance, was the speaker “punching down”)
    Barricade 10: Can you emotionally blackmail someone? (use an emotional outburst to get your way)
    Barricade 11: Darkly Hint Something Else Is What’s Really Going On (“Well, really this was all about ‘a context’ in which other bad things were happening, so the community was rightfully upset—even if I was wrong.”)

    In chapter 8 of their book Lukianoff and Schlott write:

    In Chapter 5, we explored the no-man’s-land of cheap tactics both sides share (whataboutism, strawmanning, accusations of bad faith, etc.). And in Chapter 6 we discussed the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, a multilayered, identity-based tool the left weaponizes against its ideological enemies.

    But the right has its own special tactics for dismissing arguments it doesn’t like. Unlike the convoluted Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, the right’s Efficient Rhetorical Fortress is… well, efficient. That’s because in one fell swoop it gets rid of so many viewpoints with three simple rules:

    1. You don’t have to listen to liberals (and anyone can be labeled “liberal” if they have the “wrong” opinion).
    2. You don’t have to listen to experts (even conservative experts, if they have the “wrong” opinion).
    3. You don’t have to listen to journalists (even conservative journalists if they have the “wrong” opinion).
    4. And, among the MAGA wing, there’s a fourth provision: You don’t need to listen to anyone who isn’t pro-Trump.

    I recommend this book without reservations:
    Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott: The canceling of the American mind. Simon & Schuster, 2023
    The paperback edition will be published on April 29, 2025 – with updated data, reflections on FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, and an entirely new epilogue.

    Greg Lukianoff (a graduate of Stanford University Law School) is an American lawyer and author* who serves as the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Rikki Schlott (a graduate of New York University) is a journalist (columnist at the New York Post) and was a research fellow at FIRE.
    *Lukianoff is co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018).

    More books in The American Mind series:
    Alan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987)

    Lawrence M. Eppard, Jacob L. Mackey & Lee Jussim (eds.): The Poisoning of the American Mind. George Mason University Press, 2024

    1. While they don’t employ “Mind” in their titles, the two below would seem to belong to such a series:

      “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” Richard Hofstadter

      “The Age of American Unreason,” Susan Jacoby (re: Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason”)

      1. On an Apple device there is an emoji “key” with a grinning Smiley face on it, just to left of the spacebar. Touching it will replace the keyboard with a whole raft of emojis. The arrow hitting the target lives in the sports section…counter-intuitively for our purposes. If you use it frequently it will get added to the frequently used icons that cluster up front. 🎯

        Just noticed if you type “target” (without the quotation marks) the autocomplete bar will offer that icon as a choice and you can select it directly 🎯.

    4. And I thought the correct answer was P.Z.Myers!

      “It’s alright when we do it.”

  6. But surely this is nothing new and is common fare on both (or many) sides of any given argument?

    1. But we can still say that ad hominem arguments are much more commonly employed today compared to, say, the 10 years before the Great Awokening (started about 2012).

      But yes, engaging in bad-faith argumentation has a long history:

      Arthur Schopenhauer: The art of always being right: The 38 subtle ways of persuasion. London, Gibson Square, 2009 [with an introduction and further chapters by A.C. Grayling]

      The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument (1831) (also The Art of Controversy, or Eristic Dialectic: The Art of Winning an Argument) is an acidulous, sarcastic treatise written by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). In it, Schopenhauer examines a total of thirty-eight methods of defeating one’s opponent in a debate.

      He introduces his essay with the idea that philosophers have concentrated in ample measure on the rules of logic, but have not (especially since the time of Immanuel Kant) engaged with the darker art of the dialectic, of controversy. Whereas the purpose of logic is classically said to be a method of arriving at the truth, dialectic, says Schopenhauer, “… on the other hand, would treat of the intercourse between two rational beings who, because they are rational, ought to think in common, but who, as soon as they cease to agree like two clocks keeping exactly the same time, create a disputation, or intellectual contest.”
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

    1. Lol. There has to be something wrong with the term “hominem”. It assumes male-ness.

  8. Ad Homunculus: Dismissing an argument because it comes from a small person with even smaller hands.

  9. Very good comments here – witty, even.

    [ /Snagglepuss ]

    Wondering if we can get an example of the Law….

    ….so it’s like a dialectical transformation of ad hominem which a mid-wit will perceive as a higher understanding…?

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