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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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@The_Nybbler believes that my post was pretextual, in other words that I was falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system as a way to conceal my hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.

Strangely, @The_Nybbler did not say that you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal citizen as a way to conceal your hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.

We can tell this because on reviewing what @The_Nybbler wrote, which you quoted, which was-

Or, for instance, when someone writes a long comment purporting to be about the US legal system, but is really just a vehicle to take a shot at Trump.

...which does not say you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system, or that you were doing so as a way to conceal a hidden purpose, or that your purpose of critizing Trump was hidden. In fact, key framing words such as 'falsely' and 'hidden' do not appear, which the key word 'vehicle' as a metaphor in the context of a criticism of pretext is removed, thus creating substantive change of position from what Nybbler wrote and what you claim he said.

This would politely be called strawmanning, except that strawmanning is a device when engaging in an argument with someone, but you aren't engaging with Nybbler, you are deliberately re-characterizing what Nybbler said in conveyence to external audience.

Which would politely be called 'lying about what someone said to someone else.' Which is a reoccuring feature of yours.

I maintain that my real purpose was always from the beginning to write a post criticizing Trump, but given how long my intro about the US legal system was, I can understand why someone might potentially be mislead. Since I can't add a title to the comment I added a content warning to more explicitly signal what the post was about. What would you alternatively suggest for me to do to address The_Nybbler's concerns?

Delete the post, apologize for poor writing quality, and apologize to @The_Nybbler for poor conduct.

Edit: And I see he has edited back out the troll he had edited in, but no apology in the post. Typical and meeting expectations, I suppose.

I don't have a dog in this fight having skipped the main post until i saw the back snd forth. But i interpreted theNybblers response in exactly the same way ymeskhout did.

I don't know if that was what he meant, but it is how it read to me.

Same. I felt that Nybbler was being clearly antagonistic and snide, without any sort of provocation.

I thought it was a bit of a joke. The OP started with “standards for clear concise pleading” and then sorta strayed away from that into a discussion about lawfare. Thus, the joke is that OP’s post arguably contradicts the clear concise pleading because the first half is irrelevant to the second half.

I didn't mean it as a joke but admit that I inadvertently got myself owned

Strangely, @The_Nybbler did not say that you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal citizen as a way to conceal your hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.

I interpreted his statement to mean that my post was an example of a pretextual excuse, and I don't know how else the statement would make sense given what he was directly responding to ("pretextual excuses, such as when..." flows into "Or, for instance, when someone..."). So if @The_Nybbler wasn't calling my post a pretextual excuse to criticize Trump, something which requires lying, then I will apologize for the misunderstanding. I still would be eager to understand exactly how I managed to misinterpret that sentence.

Delete the post, apologize for poor writing quality, and apologize to @The_Nybbler for poor conduct.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. Which part do you believe constitutes bad writing?