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No, and I don't understand how you can make that comparison.
It's: arresting shoplifters does not justify an elaborate sting operation, and an arrest made by a SWAT team. By the way, the sting operation involved a "free samples" sign left next to the shoplifted items, which may or may not have been obviously fake enough for a normal person to tell apart from a legitimate one.
Feel free to use the "well, technically they did shoplift" defense just don't whine about the townsfolk suddenly becoming rather uncooperative with officer Leroy Jenkins, who led the operation.
I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails. Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right? I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good; to assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".
It's the part where you're implying people agree with you on the nature and the level of badness of the transgression, and only object to the reaction for tribal affiliation reasons, rather than because they think the reaction is completely disproportionate to the alleged crime.
The problem here is that the very structure of hoax, and all the commentary around it, did not attack that part of LoTT's conduct. The hoax could only criticize her lack of vetting of her source material.
They all have a function in a balanced ecosystem, and are all completely fine, as long as they aren't taken to excess.
Check your premises before forming your conclusions, I guess.
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