Why has the shifting fortune of the world plunged one into the greedy maw of a gigantic monster called idiocy under the magnificent purple banner of holy western logic?

Everyone knows those bubbling fanboys of Dawkins and Pinker who think that superciliously pointing to terms like 'ad homniem' or 'question begging' amounts to an unbreakable rampart, founded in the mighty power of primordial logic itself. Such persons are quite blithely unworried that the thinking part of the community despises them. No wonder, for what they want and need is to immunize themselves against reason through invoking the authority of the tricky tradition of Scholastic monks and scholars.

In truth, as with the ancient Praetorian guard, the bulwark of such rules, which, indeed, were formed to keep the emperor safe (and so too thinkers in the general cause of reason), often become the surface on which his own warm blood is sprayed. Ad hominem, in the horrifyingly stupid modern usage (not its medieval usage, or the usage still preserved by a very few scholars) is the inversion of the Socratic investigation of the soul, and in truth means exactly the same thing as sophistry. I.e., don't look at me, look at the words. The "genetic fallacy", as ultimate defense of the sophist.

Parenthetically: This was historically brought in by the Logical Positivists who aped Kant in order to preserve the possibility of understanding human psychology as the root of logic, and so of analytic scientific work. Kant ruled that causality, steaming from the human psychology, was not necessarily for that reason compromised.

Another example is the sad charlatanism behind the misuse of the term "question begging" (i.e., the legitimate counter term of philosophic charity). All it means is that someone does not affirm a premise used in the argument. It is not an offence against logic, but against he who does not presuppose the affirmation of a premise used in an argument.

How is one to abolish these appallingly crude offenses against the highest labors of human life? Should persons such as Dawkins and Pinker be outlawed in the public discourse? Since they are culpable of generating mass idiocy.