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Off topic, but I want to say that this post, unlike your direct comments on the issue, made me feel sorta bad about getting a rise out of people who in my opinion have made themselves fair game with bad faith rhetoric.
You're fully correct on the object level here. There's no case against @ymeskhout that wouldn't apply equally well or much better to an unreasonable proportion of discourse in the community. If people don't want to read detailed legal commentary of Trump being {bad, again}, they can just collapse the thread (highly recommended). If they take it upon themselves to correct people being wrong/mean about their favorite politician, but find the process too onerous, they may be advised to reconsider their priorities. Elevating this to mods via reporting is just lame.
@Dean's responses, for all their characteristic argumentative quality, don't amount in substance to anything more than "I don't like it when people make a hobby of criticizing Trump here, so I'll try to shoehorn my opposition to this practice into the well-recognized failure mode of moderation tolerating incorrigible high-effort provocateurs". His own litigative tactic here is more Julius-like, if anything. Actual failings of ymeskhout that are brought forth as evidence of the Julius pattern range from trivial (editing in and out some catty remarks), to highly contestable, to apparently disingenuous (everything about failures to engage with criticism in previous rounds).
The meta level of all this, i.e. the evaporative cooling thesis and long-term consequences of flogging some dead horse, is more interesting but vague and rather hopeless for obvious reasons, and not rigorously argued, not yet at least.
To clarify the last for you, I made a judgement call around 2020 that direct topic exchanges with ymeskhout were unwarranted due to his habit of misrepresenting other people's positions and ignoring previously provided arguments. The topics at the time were cases involving the 2020 election, but the behavioral trend was more general. In a thread where multiple examples were pointed to of past examples of this (including by other posters), I wrote a long-form post explaining why I found further engagement with him (providing more engaged arguments and sources) pointless due to the faith demonstrated, and would no longer provide that level of engagement going forward. This followed up with another effort post elaborating the point on the more abstract level, and have referred to it since as to why I don't engage with ymeskhout on his post subjects anymore, but limit myself to discussion of his conduct.
The disingenuous charge against me comes from ymeskhout accuses me of not explaining my refusal to engage with him. The disingenuous charge by me is that I refer ymeskhout back to the effort post thread where I explained what I found lacking and why I found him to be acting in bad faith... which then comes to the next cycle, when ymekshout will claim for the audience that I've never provided him the reasons why.
Given that the 2020 posting was a (multi-post) effort explanation why, with both concerete and abstract reasons, and ymeskhout has repeatedly linked back to the post since (but in a way that hides the object-level objection trend from the later follow-on), I find the the accusation of not providing prior explanations why disengenuous, and demonstrative of the dishonesty (of both mis-representing positions and and the existence/nature of prior engagements) I maintain my stance of. At this point I know he knows where to find the previous position, he knows I know he knows where the previous position... and every iteration of this, he will complain that I still have not provided him my position, and I will counter that he is demonstrating the reason why I will not engage.
Me being the disingenuous one is certainly a credible enough charge to those unaware, and why I consider his objections performative at this point as part of the charge of misrepresenting other people's previous positions for current arguments, but this is also why I openly accuse him of lying, and have not recanted it despite mod warnings to not do so lightly.
Take viewpoint bias for what it is, of course, but from my position I've always been frank to the point of risking mod censure on why I will not engage ynekshout in a counter-argument form anymore- because I find him habitually dishonest when representing other people's arguments, present and past, ranging from their stance to their existence (and effort-spent) in previous engagements.
The last time you accused me of lying about other people's positions, lying about other people not giving me arguments, lying about not being provided insight into specific concerns, I responded to you in detail. None of your claims about me lying held up. Anyone is welcome to follow the link and check themselves.
So, cards on the table. You claim that your persistent refusal to engage with the actual substance of my arguments is borne out of a commitment to principle. It's what you say but how would you convince someone that you're telling the truth? Because the only other times I've ever encountered anything close to the position you're claiming to adhere to is from online activists (typically leftwing) who respond with some variant of "It's not my job to educate you" when their positions are scrutinized. It's reasonable to surmise that anyone offering that response is using it as a deflection tactic to avoid having to defend their beliefs, most likely because they know their beliefs are too weak to stand up to adversarial scrutiny.
I can't prove this conclusively because I can't read your mind, but I strongly suspect that your refusal to provide arguments because I'm purportedly acting in bad faith is just a pretextual excuse (a lie) used by you as a dodge to avoid defending your beliefs or having them scrutinized. I suspect that anti-Trump arguments in particular make you upset, but because you are unable to construct a legitimate counter-argument, you resort to a dogged and persistent response campaign which compensates for the lack of substance with a heavy dose of vitriol.
One reason I believe this is because I can't think of any good explanation for you to be so persistently tight-lipped across several years all within a forum specifically dedicated to debate and discussion. If you have an argument, just please for the love of god say it. Your excuses make no sense in this context.
Another reason I believe this is because despite the wide-array of topics I write about, what consistently acts as a trigger for your grudge with me is almost exclusively when I write about either Trump or the 2020 stolen election theories. I suspect, given your scope of attention, that you have an emotional attachment to this topic which is why it reliably elicits a hostile and angry response from you. Those posts of mine are probably the ones most exhaustively sourced, which is inconsistent with why they would be the most likely to anger you.
Another reason I believe this is because while your refusal to engage would make sense in isolation, you replace this with significant efforts towards vague denunciation riddles with lengthy wordcounts. If your goal was to save yourself from wasting time, this is incongruent conduct. It's not clear what, if anything, you gain from this behavior.
Another reason I believe this is while I can understand why someone might want to avoid typing out a long response, you flatly and explicitly have refused to even link me to sources. Some of your responses to those requests include:
"I'm not particularly interested in trying to feed you sources to be judged by you on your standards on credibility to consistency standards you impose that helpfully weed out things other people might care about and could even be true."
"I am uninterested in providing you sources on other people's positions given your conduct on this topic."
"Can I? Sure. Will I? A waste of time when you are involved, given your pattern of conduct which has been noted repeatedly over the years even if you have also repeatedly denied the feedback."
This is a patently bewildering position to hold and I can't think of any scenario where it makes any sense, except one where you are concerned that I would eviscerate your sources (flattering, admitedly). Given the circumstances, I cannot fathom an explanation more charitable than this, you are literally the only person I've encountered in this forum with a self-imposed policy against linking sources. It's wild.
I've outlined the reasons for why I hold my suspicion, and it's a suspicion I believe is especially well-founded given the scope of time involved. Suspicions can be rebutted with evidence, and I will remain open to any arguments and heavily encourage anyone and everyone to point any faults with what I've outlined above. If I am wrong and my suspicion turns out to be misplaced, I will emphatically apologize. Unless there is some new developments, my hope is that this will by my last word on this (very tiresome) saga.
This showed up in the "TheMotte needs your help" poll.
I was forced to declare it "neutral" because "high standard of evidence while politely catfighting another poster; this entire thread should be nuked; what the fuck are the mods doing" was sadly not available.
I'm genuinely not sure how I'm supposed to rate comments like this. It's hostile speculation about another poster's state of mind, in a thread that seems entirely dedicated to fighting out Dean and ymeshkout's mutual antagonism by consent of a good fraction of the board. It's like everyone's decided "screw the rules, we're turning this thread into a fighting ring." I would say "deserves a warning", but nobody here doesn't, this comment included, and it doesn't particularly deserve a warning more.
I would like to request a "Nuke this entire thread from orbit" poll option. There's a level of mess where opping individual comments simply isn't viable.
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While I (assume I) disagree with you on Trump on a variety of issues, this kind of attempt at coordination while disagreeing is quite refreshing and useful.
While other sites have flamewars, we have campfires to warm ourselves nearby.
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