Hm. I think you&#x27;re confused about what &#x27;ad hominem&#x27; means. That or you&#x27;re struggling to read more than one sentence at a time as a coherent thought. Do you realize that every sentence past the one with the word &#x27;crackpot&#x27; in it was a justification of that statement?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ad_hominem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ad_hominem</a> says &quot;... is an attack on an argument made by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, rather than attacking the argument directly&quot;.<p>So can we agree, at least, that I have attacked the argument directly, at length, and therefore the &quot;rather than...&quot; clause is not satisfied?<p>Moreover, even if you don&#x27;t agree with that: I have no obligation <i>not</i> to attack a person directly if it gets the point across faster. I am, after all, writing to the readers as much as gd1 - and if gd1 is truly irrational then I&#x27;m not particularly interested in trying to convince them of anything, nor avoiding offending them. And my attack (if you can call it that - I did say &quot;Really hard to not take you for a crackpot&quot;, which intentionally gives him a wide benefit of the doubt) was, I think, well-justified:<p>The definition of the word &quot;crackpot&quot; that I am reaching for is that of &quot;a person who believes absurd notions&quot;. That would be as opposed to &quot;a person who believes rationally justifiable notions&quot;. I called gd1 a crackpot because as a way of capturing the notion that they were not defending their argument via rationality, but by <i>insistence that it was correct</i>, and were (as I pointed out in my original post) <i>intentionally evading challenges to the argument</i> - but responding to things to that did not challenge it. These to me suggest that they had no ability to defend the argument (and I invited a proper defense), and therefore that they would be a person who believes an argument without rational defense, aka a crackpot.<p>So I posted the argument that &quot;gd1 is behaving like a crackpot for reasons A, B, C, D&quot;, and I listed the reasons.  We can substitute the phrase &quot;one who believes absurd notions&quot; for &quot;crackpot&quot;. Both the word and its substitution are derogatory terms - we can&#x27;t get around that. It&#x27;s a negative quality to believe absurd things.