Yes. It is. In real life, I have these discussions often. Also, this is the mode of communication in college. I had critical reasoning classes that were designed to identify and navigate logical fallacies, including ad hominem.
What I have found here most often (at least in the past) is that a legitimate, productive conversation will get going, and one of three things will happen:
- Someone will claim that an attack on their ideas = an attack on them personally.
– Someone will throw in the dreaded “I’m offended” card, resulting in a shift from the discussion of the topic to a meta discussion about the discussion itself.
– A third party will throw an “offended” card on behalf of someone who is engaged in the discussion. Often, this third party has not been involved in the discussion, and just ducks in to “keep things civil”. Conversation is over at this point.
But I have had discussions that have been decent for long stretches before the above 3 cancers have entered.
@SQUEEKY2: “I find if people dislike a question say here on Fluther,instead of personal attacks on the poster.
They will attack the question anyway they can,from punctuation,to clarity, and so on,and yet everyone else had no problem understanding it.”
I think you may have brought this up before, and I reject the premise. I’ve never seen people here dislike the content of a question but decide to attack the punctuation, etc instead.