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Originally Posted by smoore
It's not an argument, I was simply pointing out the hypocrisy. How someone can blast an advocacy action for making "no difference" while desiring a car that embodies the entire "drive to work, work to drive" problem baffles me.
I see no ad hominem in my post but your strawman does intrigue me. Please expound.
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I would suggest that you need to brush up on logical fallacies.
A
straw man is an attempt to distort or exaggerate an argument with the intention of disproving it. An
ad hominem attack is an attack on the person, rather than the argument the person makes. Cynthetiq's argument was that advocating change for only one hour of the year has no significant long-term impact on carbon emissions. Your rebuttal, whether it was explicit or implied, was that Cynthetiq's argument is invalid because he likes the BMW 1 series. You did not address his points, but rather attempted to use his character as a means to judge the validity of his assertions. This is by definition an
ad hominem attack and therefore invalid (
ad hominem, ergo irritus, as we pretentious Latin readers say). I pointed this out but did not exaggerate your arguments and therefore did not use any straw man.
I don't see how opposing Earth Hour and wanting a nice car are mutually exclusive. If anything they're internally consistent, but even if Cynthetiq supported Earth Hour his preference in vehicles would not be relevant as the two address totally different issues. Earth Hour is about reducing wasteful use of electricity, and does not address vehicular emissions. One could support methods to reduce energy inefficiency in the home without supporting methods to eliminate vehicular emissions without any logical conflict.