My apologies for the delay in response to your (2011!) post.

I'm playing catch-up after finishing up my course of study.

Yes, your group does sound lovely, I will join!

The world turns on us sometimes and we seem to disappear as things out of our control take us off on different tangents. I won't elaborate but once we reach senior years, it seems everything in our lives is bad news....Thanks for the wave Ruth.

Thank You for the warm welcome :)

Thank you! Glad to be a part of the community

Thank you for the welcome!

Thanks, Ruth.

Ruth, I was unable to open: 

Former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind (https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHow-Right-Lost-Its-Mind%2Fd...
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To view this discussion, go to:
http://atheistnexus.org/group/nononsense/main/topic/show?id=2182797%3ATopic%3A2777471&xg_source=msg

I was able to Google successfully;

Charlie Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind

Thanks Ruth for this warm welcome. wish we could bring some changes to the existing stereotypes. wishing to go a long way

Ill remove it

Thanks for your warm welcome,Ruth, as well as for your tips.

Thanks Ruth for the welcome!

Thank you for the warm welcome and good information. :-)

It's part of Jeff Session's renewal of the failed War on Drugs and DARE program. Anybody that is accused or arrested of a drug related violation can have their assets confiscated. It is a huge civil rights violation since it doesn't require a conviction. Some police departments have been accused of using it for profit and Trump is a big fan of it. It's all over the news today. Some states have banned it without a conviction. A persons car or house can be taken all without a conviction.

  https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/25342-trump-supports-civil-asset-forfeiture-even-without-conviction

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-wish-list-when-deciding-which-assets-to-seize.html

http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/no-conviction-no-problem-critics-concerned-by-sessions-civil-forfeiture-directive

I dunno, calling the standard model pseudoscience, saying that the LHC fails every time, and accusing everyone who supports the Big Bang theory of selling propaganda to the media and ignoring the published literature ... seems pretty ballistic to me.

He's attacking the ideas at the beginning there, not me ... thus the part where I stated "ballistic attack of subject."  The insult at the end is the part that is a form of ad hominem.  "You just want to believe, so I'm not going to waste my time giving you any evidence for my claims," is essentially an attack on my intellectual rigor, and he explicitly refused to address the actual subject.  What would you call that, other than an ad hominem attack?

I called him out on storming off in a huff and refusing to address what I said, after he stormed off, in this most recent exchange about him not understanding what words mean.  That's not an ad hominem against him, since he refused to provide me with an argument to address ... which was my point, after all.

And sure, Tom is argumentative.  No problem there.  The problem is that he regularly displays some of the worst intellectual cowardice that I've encountered on here.  I've talked to several other people on here who have had the same sorts of problems with him, in regards to both his anti-Banger crusade and other subjects.

Tom is/was (he's retired) a freaking engineer, which he seems to think makes him an authority on theoretical physics, such that he doesn't have to back up his hyperbolic statements with material from people who actually know what they're talking about.

Here's the previous encounter that I was referring to, about Tom's attack on the Big Bang model of cosmology, by the way.  You can see the pattern that I was referring to.

http://atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/hi-people-1?commentId=2182797%3AComment%3A2732892

http://atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/hi-people-1?commentId=2182797%3AComment%3A2733449

Tom: *ballistic attack of subject*

Me: *incomprehension*

Tom: *ballistic attack of subject*

Me: Huh?  Could you give me a link so I can see what you're talking about and have a reason to take you seriously?

Tom: *storms off after insulting me*

Humorously, what Tom did could be considered a bit of an ad hominem, if you stretch the meaning a little.  It isn't the classic form of the fallacy, but there are elements of it.

Thank you Ruth! Hope you're having a great week. ;-)