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You are absolutely free to relentlessly plumb the problems with some specific politician's take on Jewish space lasers being weather control machines or whatever. I even think there is something directionally correct about your comment, in the sense that I think most people are somewhat low-agency by my preferred standards.
But when you additionally frame all that in a broad swipe at your outgroup, I'm afraid it just becomes a boo light instead of a meaningful contribution to discussion.
I don't think you understood what I wrote. I don't think conservatives are particularly low agency. I think there is a general tendency for everyone to act as if they are low agency. For example, the excerpt I quote from from @Goodguy's post, where he literally says they're too stupid to help themselves. So I'm a little unclear as to what the dividing line here is. You can say conservatives are too stupid to be held accountable, but you can't note that people do this?
While I would not exactly endorse Goodguy's post, (1) other people's behavior is irrelevant to your own and (2) here is what he actually said:
First off, "to me" and "seem" do some work here: reporting on your own perception in a very clear way does not excuse flagrantly bad behavior, but in the interest of encouraging honesty of self-report, it does provide some cover. Second, "supporters of those theories" is a reasonably specific group in this context, in a way that "conservatives" simply is not.
Now to what you said:
Any time you find yourself slipping into "us" versus "them" language, odds are pretty good you're running afoul of the rules somewhere. At minimum, it tends toward consensus-building or antagonism. You didn't even don the fig leaf of "it seems to me that they are ignorant." Maybe this is because what you wrote there was taking a certain outside perspective--"they" switches from "conservatives" to liberals" in your second paragraph, so you are raising the defense that "this is what some people think, not me but some people." But the level of heat you put into what "some people" think still falls on the wrong side of the rules, I think.
It's highly relevant, because I am trying to figure out what the actual infraction is, and one of the ways I'm going to do that is by comparing what I did to seemingly similar behavior from others. Right now it looks to me like it is somehow less provocative to say "Trump supporters are so stupid they can't help believing in conspiracy theories" than it is to point out that someone has said this. (The former, while directionally atypical for this forum, is within normal parameters of discussion as far as content goes, but it nevertheless seems to be a more controversial claim than the latter).
You perhaps understand my confusion.
So you're saying that if I'd sprinkled in a few hedging words, there wouldn't be a problem? Or if I'd specified "Republicans" and "Democrats"? Forgive me if I am skeptical.
That is me characterizing the pattern of thinking I am talking about, as exemplified in the excerpt I quoted. I really don't know what you want here. If I actually thought that Trump supporters were dumb animals, I wouldn't be objecting to a double standard, I would be enthusiastically affirming it.
No, don't compare yourself to unmoderated comments; we don't (can't) moderate every rules violation, because we don't even see most of them. Most of the time, a comment has to get reported first.
"Republicans" and "Democrats" is probably still too general, because those are not meaningfully homogeneous groups beyond the fact of their group membership. You need to specify to a meaningful degree. "People who believe in God" is a very general group, but you can say some things about them in a permissible way. And I definitely didn't say "sprinkle in a few hedging words and there won't be a problem," I said something more like "hedging and honest self report can be mitigating factors, provided the rest of your comment isn't too blatantly terrible in other ways."
But first, you never say "suppose someone thinks that..." and second, your characterization slips into weak man territory. Remember, you opened with:
So this sets the expectation that you think that conservatives (as well as liberals) think, concerning conservatives:
It's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you include yourself in "conservatives" or "liberals" so it's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you are hiding your own views behind a neutral "some people think" point of view, or what. If you're going to run with a "some people think" argument, then you need to be either steel manning it, or proactively providing evidence of what those "some people" actually think.
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