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Imagine if someone made the statement: "This is a tinfoil hat argument." Or, more directly: "This is an idiotic argument". How about "that argument is positively pedophiliac!"

Any time you take a pejorative term and apply it to the argument, it is always going to sound like you're applying it to there person. In most cases, that's the way it reads as well. It seems a way to engage in personal attack while being able to pretend to have only been characterizing the argument.

If you said "this argument has logical fallacy X because Y is Z" that would be a characterization of the argument of a totally different color. That would be addressing weaknesses in the argument, rather than anthropomorphizing it.

I have no opinion or position on your intentions, and presume that it wasn't your intention to characterize the person making the argument. I'm just trying to show why that form of characterizing the argument comes off as a personal attack.




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