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No U

It's one of those little things that's always bothered me that would have made for an excellent and intellectually stimulating conversation practically made for accompaniment by a glass of red wine if it weren't for the fact that nearly everyone I know is under the legal drinking age. So that's made me grab this topic, shove it in a bag and throw it in a trunk, lock that trunk then sit on it indirectly with fifteen art history manuscripts as the middlemen, but now, despite still being under the legal drinking age, I'd like to talk about the use of hypocrisy as a defence.

Suppose someone accused someone else of performing something absolutely dastardly, something shamelessly unethical or so far on the opposite end of the spectrum that it deserves a smack on the head, just as a good follow up of matyrdom, like every saint should. The accused then breaks into a smirk, grin, or befittingly of his saint status, an enlightened and gentle smile and says,

"Well, aren't you one to talk?"

His will is done, and the aspiring prosecutor joins Rowan Atkinson on the path from a life of wonder and splendor to that of a linguistically retarded man with an unsettling attraction to teddy bears. He now looks like a moron and the formerly accused is now free to continue his work, but now with double the satisfaction and a huge smirk on his face.

But even aside from the fact that his accuser may have been guilty of hypocrisy, it still doesn't change the fact that the accused hasn't in fact defended himself from anything. He hasn't in anyway refuted the incoming accusation in anyway and he might as well just have pointed how ugly his adversary's tie was, and how ties are a bad idea in general.

And this might all seem well enough and self-explanatory in an over-the- top, one dimensionally portrayed incident like this, but in real life, which tends to have a lot more dimensions and thus a lot more space for the important stuff to get lost in, pointing out that an adversary is guilty of hypocrisy and then shimmying away from the dispute without having to actually defend yourself, and you can do all of that under cheery applause.

I realize that all of this really has a place in Latin terminology so sophisticated it has to be italics: Ad hominem tu quoque. But what I'd like to call attention to is the mind-blowing ease in which it can be performed and the frequency with which it happens.

Then again, I've probably done that several times myself, but I'm not sure that's the point.

Edit: I realized that the fancy Latin phrase that I said had to be in italics was in fact NOT in italics. So yeah. I just went back and edited it in hopes that no one would notice. Then I explicitly wrote an update note at the end.