I don’t know how the mods decide, but I do know what I consider a personal attack. It’s fairly simple. Anything that focuses on the person and not on the issue is a personal attack. It is ok to focus on the person if it is not an attack (although sometimes I have been known to consider a compliment to be an attack, but that’s just my pathology). So compliments and sympathy are all ok.
I think it gets difficult when the person is also the issue. How do you tell someone who makes demeaning comments about your way of thinking that they are an asshole? You don’t. Rather, you stick to “I” statements that explain how you feel about what they said. “That comment made me feel like dirt, and I don’t think it was warranted. You didn’t really answer my point, you just made disparaging remarks about my way of thinking.”
But here’s the wonderful thing. If someone is calling you names, that means you won! That means they don’t have an argument left in them, so when you have no more idea, you resort to trying to makes someone feel stupid. That’s the personal attack. I actually don’t mind them because I can point out how the person has gone off topic and that means they have conceded the field of battle to me. Usually they don’t know what to say and the kicker is that you usually get tons of lurve when you point that out.
But, alas, fluther wants to control ad hominem attacks themselves and not let us police ourselves with our wit and intelligence. So we don’t get to get all snippy to other people who are clearly mental midgets. I suppose it’s hardly fair. So the mods cut them off at their knees, metaphorically speaking. Unfortunately, since they are midgets, that means the mods are decapitating them.~