Reflections From a Murky Pond

You hear a lot of people, mostly Liberals and Progressives, whining about supposed ad hominem attacks. They just don’t, from what I can see, have a firm grasp on what that term means.

Ad Hominem

A Hominem ( Latin for  “to the man” ) is short for argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy that is an attempt to negate the validity of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it.

While Leftists of all sorts do get abused regularly be citizens of the Civilized World, especially Americans, I see only a small minority of the occurrences being truly argumentum ad hominem.

In political discussions and across the blogosphere – neither a place known for staid and polite discourse – I see comparatively few instances where people have tried to negate the validity of a Leftist’s claim by pointing out the Leftist’s negative characteristics or beliefs.

I have, on the other hand, often seen examples of what I’ll call argumentum ad factis ( Latin for “to the facts” ). Very often people try negate the validity of Leftists by pointing out the negative characteristics of their arguments.

It’s not the same thing to say that they’re wrong because of their arguments (“ad factis“) as it is to say that their arguments are wrong because they said them (ad hominem).

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As The Commercial Appeal reports it, some two dozen or so Tennessee TEA Party supporters want the state’s history curriculum changed.  Specifically, they want slavery and issues with the Native American tribes downplayed as compared to how they’re handled currently.

No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.

~*~

The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at.

As one would expect, the MSM has made a lot of this request to the Tennessee legislature and, as one would also expect, the Liberals and their minority tenants are frothing at the mouth over it.

But are the requests of these TEA Partiers requests for historical revisionism or merely for a restoration of the curriculum as it was before the oikophobic Liberals corrupted the school systems with their own pernicious form of anti-American revisionism?

I know what the history curriculum was when I was in school and I know it didn’t hide the fact that the Founding fathers were slaveholders. It also didn’t make that, or any other societal flaw, the focus of the classes either.

That’s not, however, how history is taught in most states these days. The Liberals got control over the curriculum years ago and shifted it to focus on the negatives instead of the achievements of Americans. I can’t say for sure though that this is case in Tennessee or, if it is, how egregious the current curriculum is.

Restoration or revision? Frankly, I don’t know. Either seems possible.

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Love him or loath him – and there’s plenty of reasons for the latter – one has to admit that Newt Gingrich has never been one to shy away of telling it as he sees it to be.

As an American I am not so shocked that Obama was given The Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, because America gave him the White House based on the same credentials.

– Newt Gingrich

And he often speaks sooth when he does so – not always by any means, but certainly often enough to be listened to and for his words to be considered.

That, by itself, makes Mr. Gingrich an interesting and somewhat compelling contender for he GOP nomination and for the Presidency. Now, if only he wasn’t so erratic…

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