The Subtle Art Of The Implied Ad Homunem
In some places, the idea of attacking an individual in order to undervalue their contributions is so frowned upon, as part of their business, that they resort to hidden tactics in order to conceal such personal attacks. Often times people can develop self-doubt in such an environment, not because of anything explicitly said about them, but of the things being implied about them. And because it is so subtle sometimes, debate club might not even reduce a debaters score on a test. It can often show up in the form of advice, and undermining the contributions of the main operating thing, without specifically saying the main thing is bad, but by undervaluing the things that contributed to the main thing damaging the reputation of the thing it is associated with.
As a practical example, a young girl is told by her mother that now her hair doesn’t look as good as it did: the daughter assumes in good faith that her mother is talking about how good her actual hair looks, without considering that her mother meant the things in her hair, but her mother didn’t say: you have some food smutz in your hair, rather than her having tangles. The comment is left deliberately vague, so that it lets the victim imagine what exactly it is that makes her hair look bad. So even the mother hasn’t said she should cut her hair, the daughter assumes that cutting off her hair up to shoulder is what her mother wanted. When in reality, the mother just wanted to complain about her daughter’s hair to ruin her self-esteem.
I like to call such situations the Implied Personal Attack, rather an explicit one. The common mode of operation is the attacker usually undervalues the contributions of associated things, rather than the thing in question, and so extremely hurtful things can be assumed as advice in good faith, when nothing specifically helpful to the person was ever intended.
We have an influx of this problem, specifically in the world of Conspiracy Theories, and not just in right-wing conspiracy theories. Critical Theories specifically are really good at this subtle tactic, while avoiding actual direct personal attacks, so that they can maintain a professional appearance. This is the way that the extreme left is also often more dangerous than the extreme right, because you still feel the personal attack being made, while it not being as in your face with Alt-Right groups like Comicsgate.
And yet it is just as effective as a personal attack, and can completely wreck people’s self-esteem; and by completely ruining self-esteem, that in essence makes you even more vulnerable to gas-lighting. With groups where their entire specialty is implied fallacies, it can often mean that them damaging things associated with a thing does not immediately read as being a personal attack against a thing. It can often be used to trick people to take a route they might not otherwise, even if said advice was never actually intended. But the one making the comment stays around, because they find ambiguous language hilarious.