Where is the dividing line between a personal attack and a factual attack?
This is an excellent question. A personal attack (also known as an “ad hominem” attack) is where the person that the attacker is attacking is the recipient of the attack purely because the attacker doesn’t like him or her. If an author (or a reader making a comment on an article) wants to say, “Joe Shmoe is dumber than Forest Gump,” he or she must also factually demonstrate how he or she knows this to be a true fact. Without evidence to back the claim, such a claim becomes nothing more than a personal attack, which Nolan Chart LLC frowns upon. The difficult part about all this, of course, is that some attacks are borderline in nature. In such cases, it becomes a judgment call. Nolan Chart LLC’s management will decide on a case by case basis (as necessary) whether a claim of “personal attack” is valid or not. Rest assured that the basis of our decision will not be political at all. Rather, it will be based primarily on what we feel is best for all our readers and authors together, as we
