naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
We are far from the content-free insult comment you tried to pin on him at first. Your examples are not even 10% as bad as guesswho’s comment.
That isn't a counter-argument, but rather a flat dismissal (two flat dismissals, technically) of the argument presented. What does he think the difference is between government coercion and private business, and why is that difference significant?
It’s not good or original, but it is an argument. I can’t believe this discussion has logically arrived at a point where I’m supposed to make “Darwin’s 10 shittiest arguments ever” for him, which I am positive I am 100% opposed to.
“Well, I think it makes a rather big difference whether the state enforces censorship, or private persons. For one, no one gets put in jail. For two, the option is still there in theory. Obviously government censorship is far more absolute. And it would violate people’s right of self-association to force them to provide services to just anyone. If Jeff Bezos only wants to sell diverse literature, that is his inalienable right. ” Or something? I’m going to take a pass on the connection to communism, but I’m sure an argument can be made somehow.
A maximally-uncharitable summary, delivered with the standard indirection. A maximally-uncharitable description of the purported idea behind the essay. An actual, explicit argument this time, albeit one simply asserted with no specific evidence provided and no consideration of possible counter-arguments, delivered in an attitude of absolute certainty.
I gotta say, I find it extremely unfair of you not to quote the edit, which is far more conciliatory:
EDIT: Someone downpost suggested that I append a later post I made to my original post here, as they say it was much clearer in helping them understanding my position. It may be that the post above is jumping too many inferential gaps and not making my stance clear. Here's the later comment:
I'm not claiming that this is Caplan's intent or exactly what he said, but I'm saying that it is the natural result of his ideas.
These ideas are not new. They're fundamental to many of the types of respectability politics and assimilationist civil rights efforts that have always existed in the larger dialogue around these issues.
They're not evil or stupid ideas, and maybe they're even not bad advice for the individual.
But on a societal level, where these ideas always lead is a huge burden on the minorities and outsiders to do all the work of fitting in and trying not to bother anyone, with no burden or expectations on the majority because they're already dominant and seen as the resepctable, civilized default, so why would they change?
And every time this is tried, no amount of integration or assimilation is ever good enough to be fully accepted, no amount of humility is ever enough to forever avoid offense, no amount of brotherhood ever erases prejudice and systematic discrimination. Respectable black people who minimize their identity and try to appease their white neighbors still find burning crosses on their lawns, employers still point at crime statistics and demographic IQ statistics and everything else to turn down minority applications, Trump still says 'I can't stand having black guys count my money.' No amount of appeasement is ever enough to stop these things from happening.
And when they do happen, this type of thinking places the blame for that failure on the minorities who are being discriminated against, because they didn't do enough to fit in and appease, because they had the responsibility to shrink their identity in the first place, and I guess these attacks on them are evidence that they failed. It's a final and awful betrayal that excuses the real perpetrators and continues the cycle forever, generation after generation.
I'm certainly not saying Caplan is in favor of the outcomes I just described, or that he's even aware of them. But we've been down the road with this type of thinking before, we know where it leads.
The idea of 'pride' and identitraian politics is far from perfect, but it's trying to present an alternative to this endless cycle. We're all open to new suggestions about better ways we could be trying to make progress, but not to a suggestion that we try going back to the same old thing that was failing us before.
And even the non-edit part is just vigorous disagreement, there’s nothing wrong with it. Overuse on your part of ‘uncharitable’ . Darwin’s a progressive. Progressive views are uncharitable towards white males, reactionaries etc. So are anti-woke views towards them. He’s not obligated to pretend any random essay from his enemies must surely come from the best of intentions and make sense, and not pattern-match it to what his ideology tells him about those people.
Again, I don't expect you to agree that these examples are typical of his behavior.
That’s where you’re wrong , I agree this is fairly typical , he acted frequently in this manner. But it has nothing to do with what you originally defined his behaviour as. Guesswho’s behaviour is bad. Darwin’s behaviour is acceptable. Nothing but personalized insults towards another commenter, bad, argument that implies white males are terrible and reactionaries don’t know what they’re talking about, okay.
one commenter puts some effort into penetrating the fog, puts together an argument and provides specific claims: there is no empirical evidence to back the position Darwin is describing. Darwin's reply is "did you watch my video?". The poster says they haven't, but asks for a summary, or just the points Darwin thought were particularly relevant. Darwin declines to provide one
Well if 07mk doesn’t want to watch darwin’s video and darwin doesn’t want to watch the other video, I guess they just go home and call it a lame draw. This is not the decisive discovery of the dastardly deeds of darwin.
He is shaming. He is attempting to build consensus.
A consensus of one. A shaming contingent of one. This is not how those rules are meant to be used. They’re not there to protect the overwhelming, massively upvoted majority from one guy arguing against the current.
Nybbler calls him out explicitly, and is promptly warned by a mod. Darwin ignores him. That comment is worth its own discussion; I can see the mod's point, but I think if that comment is over the line, it shouldn't be over by much. Making solid, pointed predictions about verifiable reality is one of the more useful things here.
Well obviously, it’s a great comment. I’m not usually in favour of punitive mod decisions, if you hadn’t noticed. Except for that false flag nazi alt multitude.
He says maybe there's something there but not really, and then stops responding.
I don’t like your paraphrases, I would describe them as ‘maximally uncharitable’. “stops responding” cannot count as any sort of offense, I told you. He says this:
I'm sure there's something going on, but I think it's probably highschool kids being stupid on both sides of the debate, and maybe the judge punishing his ideological opponents, and I'm saying even if that's all true, the accusations that people are spinning out from it are no more valid than the accusations I could spin out if those guys on the street were shouting 'Maga country!'.
He has backpedaled considerably from the beginning, he no longer believes they were saying maga, or that his original interpretations had any validity. We are witnessing a man slowly changing his mind, and it’s beautiful.
The basic problem with any non-forced-anon forum is that conversations generate history between the participants, and sooner or later that history turns into bad blood and drama.
What a surprise, you’re pessimistic about this community, too? Yet, the one thing that we cannot say is that our values have drifted apart, right?
I don’t know, there isn’t any bad blood with anyone I argued with. From my end, anyway.
We are far from the content-free insult comment you tried to pin on him at first. Your examples are not even 10% as bad as guesswho’s comment.
Your assessments are your own, but it seems to me that the initial reply to the Kaplan post, at least, was considerably worse. Further, have you considered his extensive explanations of how his initial post was entirely innocent and reasonable and anyone who thinks otherwise is just being irrationally hostile? If not, give it a read; if you feel up to continuing this conversation the additional context might help.
I am quite certain that guesswho is darwin, and I think it's reasonably likely they'll either admit it eventually or a solid consensus will emerge among the rest of the posters, including yourself; to my eye the stylistic tics are too numerous and obvious to ignore. I want to be clear, though: I think the question of whether they actually are darwin or not is essentially trivia. What I think actually matters is that their posts are bad in a very, very similar way to the way darwin's posts were bad. To the extent that people remember darwin fondly, I think that is because they do not actually remember what he was like. To the extent that darwin's treatment is significant, I think it's worth looking at the nature of his participation.
In any case, we've looked at five threads, and it seems to me that at in at least four of those threads, we're pretty far from Darwin being a high-quality contributor who got snippy with people who were rude to him. Would you agree that in those threads, we've seen him initiating with low-effort and highly inflammatory posts, and that other posters expend significant effort attempting to have a civil conversation without much success?
I can’t believe this discussion has logically arrived at a point where I’m supposed to make “Darwin’s 10 shittiest arguments ever” for him, which I am positive I am 100% opposed to.
I do not think the arguments we're looking at are unusually bad relative to Darwin's average output; my memory is that his posting quality was as consistent as it was awful. unfortunately, I think you do actually have to do this, for a simple reason that I hope I can now demonstrate.
“Well, I think it makes a rather big difference whether the state enforces censorship, or private persons. For one, no one gets put in jail. For two, the option is still there in theory. Obviously government censorship is far more absolute. And it would violate people’s right of self-association to force them to provide services to just anyone. If Jeff Bezos only wants to sell diverse literature, that is his inalienable right.” Or something? I’m going to take a pass on the connection to communism, but I’m sure an argument can be made somehow.
This is an entirely reasonable interpretation of Darwin's initial comment, and it seems pretty similar to the interpretation several of the posters went with when formulating replies, which were then ignored. I think what you wrote would have been a much better comment than what he went with, considerably less inflammatory, and somewhat higher in content. Unfortunately, the problem is that this is an argument you are imagining, not the argument Darwin actually is making. He absolutely is not claiming that Bezos or any other businessman has a right to sell whatever they choose. He absolutely is not arguing that private censorship is okay (or wrong), or even agreeing that state censorship is wrong (or okay). The argument you are imagining does not exist in that thread.
That may seem like a strong claim. Fortunately, I can prove it pretty solidly, because in that very thread darwin himself very explicitly said so.:
Not exactly. As you imply, I'm really speaking for a more moderate and nuanced position on the whole issue.
I'm attempting to illustrate how extreme the position I'm responding to is, by drawing a parallel to another ideology which the speaker themself would probably find radical and objectionable.
Yes, I am a little worried about deplatforming in cases where corporations have monopolistic power to distort the public discourse in coercive/violent ways, and I've talked a lot about that - my hope is that we can find a technological solution using decentralized social media platforms, but that may be too optimistic and we might have to do something more drastic eventually.
But I also think that the extreme version of this ideology - coercing private entities to host speech and actions they disagree with, making it functionally impossible for people to build private spaces with the people and discourse they prefer, limiting societies ability to condemn and ostracize bad or dangerous ideas - is just another form of tyranny and violent coercion all it's own.
This isn't a situation where you can make simple categorical imperatives and ignore all nuance - either direction you go while doing that will end in a bad place. This is a situation where you have to lie to the murderer but not to your spouse.
My comment was meant to point out to OP that they were ignoring a massive pile of important context and nuance, and in doing so they were implicitly embracing conclusions that they probably don't support. And yes, I said it in a flippant way, because OP was comparing the entire Blue Tribe to an evil Pope trying to brainwash and control the ignorant masses. I do tend to mirror the tone and energy of the comments I'm replying to.
Emphasis mine.
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote. Everyone in that thread who assumed he was speaking plainly and in good faith wasted their time, as you did just now, because he had zero intention of actually prosecuting the argument he implied he was making. His actual argument was that agreeing with BJ's position necessarily makes you either a socialist or a hypocrite, because the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it. That's the entire content of his original post, according to a detailed explanation by the man himself.
Welcome to arguing with Darwin.
Given that his own explanation of his comment completely contradicts your understanding*, it's worth looking at what he actually said in some detail.
Yes, if you completely ignore the difference between government coercion and private businesses.
Did the original essay ignore the difference between government coercion and private business? No, in fact, because the essay is solely about why "book burning" is a bad thing in the abstract, not about whether people should be prevented from doing it, much less how this prevention might be accomplished. His final conclusion is that "book burning" is a loser strategy anyway, so there's no point in worrying about it. Darwin completely ignores the argument BJ made, preferring to substituting an argument that he himself finds more convinient. He does this, by his own admission, because he was annoyed that BJ was saying something negative about his preferred ideology.
Of course, it wouldn't be very persuasive for him to straightforwardly say "This abstract question is dumb, let's talk about a different concrete issue instead". What he does instead is frame his comment as an accusation: "you completely ignore [x]", rather than as a statement of his own views: "I think [x]". Because he does this in as inflammatory a manner as possible, people are too busy reacting to his snarling tone to notice he's pulled a switcharoo on the actual argument being made. Further, the frame of the discussion is now whether the OP did or did not ignore something important about an issue the OP did not even address; meanwhile, in darwin's mind, he has not even offered an opinion of his own at all, so he has zero reason to respond to those like yourself who "misinterpret" him as having done so.
Which, hey, if you're willing to do that, I have a whole lot of socialist literature about the evils of capitlaism to share with you.
He's making an accusation of hypocrisy here, trying to imply that the OP's argument is indistinguishable from socialism, so if you accept one you have to accept the other. This is absurd for a whole host of reasons, in addition to being low effort and inflammatory. And again, the mistake here would be to actually argue the point, because none of this is at all valid: he's provided no actual argument for the similarity between what he claims is the OP's argument and socialism, but in fact he is lying about what the OP's argument even is. At no point in the essay did BJ say anything about forcing anyone to post anything; in fact, he concluded that we should do nothing at all, because this behavior is self-destructive.
I stand by my original claim: That comment contained no argument at all. That is to say, a straightforward interpretation of his message results in an argument he does not "intend" to make and so will not engage productively with, and the message he actually wants to deliver is implied indirectly by interpretation of a highly inflammatory statement he claims not to actually mean. This is not mind-reading on my part, but rather darwin's own explanation of the comment in question.
It seems to me that this is a profoundly shitty method of communicating. It is hard to imagine a more perfect example of the exact opposite of the sort of conversation our rules are meant to encourage. In a mere two sentences, it badly violates most of the rules in the header. When people attempt to engage productively, he claims they've misunderstood him, and that his behavior is totally reasonable, while making vague anodyne statements that imply but never actually commit to reasonableness, while mixing in further sarcastic, passive-aggressive or just generaly smug digs at them for not understanding how obviously right he is. This encourages them to continue engaging and generally results in frustration and hostility, which he paints as unreasonable aggression on their part.
And again, I emphasize that this is how Darwin opens conversations, and that comments of this nature were the norm. We've looked at a mere five threads, and four of them contained multiple instances of this behavior. Darwin was absurdly prolific; I'm confident I can present you with an arbitrary number of examples.
...You wrote more, and I intend to reply to it, but I'm past 10k characters and would like to see if this changes your assessment any. I'll break it here.
I am quite certain that guesswho is darwin, and I think it's reasonably likely they'll either admit it eventually or a solid consensus will emerge among the rest of the posters, including yourself
My eyes quickly glaze over any trans discussion, but I think there’s less than a 1% chance of guesswho being darwin, and you can quote me on that. He’s an antagonistic progressive, he's got progressive stylistic ticks, that’s basically the extent of the similarity. Other arguments include: as you say, darwin was prolific, why would he even use an alt, and keep it secret, after he did leave that time he was banned, just to make a few random comments. It's not parsimonious.
In any case, we've looked at five threads, and it seems to me that at in at least four of those threads, we're pretty far from Darwin being a high-quality contributor who got snippy with people who were rude to him
He did get a lot of AAQC. So you'll have to concede these aren't his best arguments, at least.
Would you agree that in those threads, we've seen him initiating with low-effort and highly inflammatory posts, and that other posters expend significant effort attempting to have a civil conversation without much success?
There’s low-effort, and there’s content-free. Strictly low-effort posts are only really bad if they express a very common idea (for the sub), imo. As to ‘inflammatory’, it is just a function of a commenter’s ideological distance. We need to tolerate inflammation, as it is a key aspect of the body's immune defenses.
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote.
Disagree, he does endorse the interpretation partly with:
But I also think that the extreme version of this ideology - coercing private entities to host speech and actions they disagree with, making it functionally impossible for people to build private spaces with the people and discourse they prefer, limiting societies ability to condemn and ostracize bad or dangerous ideas - is just another form of tyranny and violent coercion all it's own.
This is getting into way too many details of one argument. Our fundamental disagreement is whether his behaviour here is bad. What is the rule, applicable to all commenters, that he broke ? “The defendant made a short comment that implied a certain argument, but then later only partially endorsed it, and in further clarifications it became clear that he endorsed another argument more”
The fact that he is incorrect from our pov, that ‘the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it.’ is weak, is not for us to punish (through force).
You are using his own, extensive clarifications to catch him in a contradiction, when they put the lie to your other accusations, that he was just sniping, that he wasn’t engaging. Wouldn’t it be worse if he had not explained what he meant?
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Notes -
We are far from the content-free insult comment you tried to pin on him at first. Your examples are not even 10% as bad as guesswho’s comment.
It’s not good or original, but it is an argument. I can’t believe this discussion has logically arrived at a point where I’m supposed to make “Darwin’s 10 shittiest arguments ever” for him, which I am positive I am 100% opposed to.
“Well, I think it makes a rather big difference whether the state enforces censorship, or private persons. For one, no one gets put in jail. For two, the option is still there in theory. Obviously government censorship is far more absolute. And it would violate people’s right of self-association to force them to provide services to just anyone. If Jeff Bezos only wants to sell diverse literature, that is his inalienable right. ” Or something? I’m going to take a pass on the connection to communism, but I’m sure an argument can be made somehow.
I gotta say, I find it extremely unfair of you not to quote the edit, which is far more conciliatory:
And even the non-edit part is just vigorous disagreement, there’s nothing wrong with it. Overuse on your part of ‘uncharitable’ . Darwin’s a progressive. Progressive views are uncharitable towards white males, reactionaries etc. So are anti-woke views towards them. He’s not obligated to pretend any random essay from his enemies must surely come from the best of intentions and make sense, and not pattern-match it to what his ideology tells him about those people.
That’s where you’re wrong , I agree this is fairly typical , he acted frequently in this manner. But it has nothing to do with what you originally defined his behaviour as. Guesswho’s behaviour is bad. Darwin’s behaviour is acceptable. Nothing but personalized insults towards another commenter, bad, argument that implies white males are terrible and reactionaries don’t know what they’re talking about, okay.
Well if 07mk doesn’t want to watch darwin’s video and darwin doesn’t want to watch the other video, I guess they just go home and call it a lame draw. This is not the decisive discovery of the dastardly deeds of darwin.
A consensus of one. A shaming contingent of one. This is not how those rules are meant to be used. They’re not there to protect the overwhelming, massively upvoted majority from one guy arguing against the current.
Well obviously, it’s a great comment. I’m not usually in favour of punitive mod decisions, if you hadn’t noticed. Except for that false flag nazi alt multitude.
I don’t like your paraphrases, I would describe them as ‘maximally uncharitable’. “stops responding” cannot count as any sort of offense, I told you. He says this:
He has backpedaled considerably from the beginning, he no longer believes they were saying maga, or that his original interpretations had any validity. We are witnessing a man slowly changing his mind, and it’s beautiful.
What a surprise, you’re pessimistic about this community, too? Yet, the one thing that we cannot say is that our values have drifted apart, right?
I don’t know, there isn’t any bad blood with anyone I argued with. From my end, anyway.
Your assessments are your own, but it seems to me that the initial reply to the Kaplan post, at least, was considerably worse. Further, have you considered his extensive explanations of how his initial post was entirely innocent and reasonable and anyone who thinks otherwise is just being irrationally hostile? If not, give it a read; if you feel up to continuing this conversation the additional context might help.
I am quite certain that guesswho is darwin, and I think it's reasonably likely they'll either admit it eventually or a solid consensus will emerge among the rest of the posters, including yourself; to my eye the stylistic tics are too numerous and obvious to ignore. I want to be clear, though: I think the question of whether they actually are darwin or not is essentially trivia. What I think actually matters is that their posts are bad in a very, very similar way to the way darwin's posts were bad. To the extent that people remember darwin fondly, I think that is because they do not actually remember what he was like. To the extent that darwin's treatment is significant, I think it's worth looking at the nature of his participation.
In any case, we've looked at five threads, and it seems to me that at in at least four of those threads, we're pretty far from Darwin being a high-quality contributor who got snippy with people who were rude to him. Would you agree that in those threads, we've seen him initiating with low-effort and highly inflammatory posts, and that other posters expend significant effort attempting to have a civil conversation without much success?
I do not think the arguments we're looking at are unusually bad relative to Darwin's average output; my memory is that his posting quality was as consistent as it was awful. unfortunately, I think you do actually have to do this, for a simple reason that I hope I can now demonstrate.
This is an entirely reasonable interpretation of Darwin's initial comment, and it seems pretty similar to the interpretation several of the posters went with when formulating replies, which were then ignored. I think what you wrote would have been a much better comment than what he went with, considerably less inflammatory, and somewhat higher in content. Unfortunately, the problem is that this is an argument you are imagining, not the argument Darwin actually is making. He absolutely is not claiming that Bezos or any other businessman has a right to sell whatever they choose. He absolutely is not arguing that private censorship is okay (or wrong), or even agreeing that state censorship is wrong (or okay). The argument you are imagining does not exist in that thread.
That may seem like a strong claim. Fortunately, I can prove it pretty solidly, because in that very thread darwin himself very explicitly said so.:
Emphasis mine.
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote. Everyone in that thread who assumed he was speaking plainly and in good faith wasted their time, as you did just now, because he had zero intention of actually prosecuting the argument he implied he was making. His actual argument was that agreeing with BJ's position necessarily makes you either a socialist or a hypocrite, because the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it. That's the entire content of his original post, according to a detailed explanation by the man himself.
Welcome to arguing with Darwin.
Given that his own explanation of his comment completely contradicts your understanding*, it's worth looking at what he actually said in some detail.
Did the original essay ignore the difference between government coercion and private business? No, in fact, because the essay is solely about why "book burning" is a bad thing in the abstract, not about whether people should be prevented from doing it, much less how this prevention might be accomplished. His final conclusion is that "book burning" is a loser strategy anyway, so there's no point in worrying about it. Darwin completely ignores the argument BJ made, preferring to substituting an argument that he himself finds more convinient. He does this, by his own admission, because he was annoyed that BJ was saying something negative about his preferred ideology.
Of course, it wouldn't be very persuasive for him to straightforwardly say "This abstract question is dumb, let's talk about a different concrete issue instead". What he does instead is frame his comment as an accusation: "you completely ignore [x]", rather than as a statement of his own views: "I think [x]". Because he does this in as inflammatory a manner as possible, people are too busy reacting to his snarling tone to notice he's pulled a switcharoo on the actual argument being made. Further, the frame of the discussion is now whether the OP did or did not ignore something important about an issue the OP did not even address; meanwhile, in darwin's mind, he has not even offered an opinion of his own at all, so he has zero reason to respond to those like yourself who "misinterpret" him as having done so.
He's making an accusation of hypocrisy here, trying to imply that the OP's argument is indistinguishable from socialism, so if you accept one you have to accept the other. This is absurd for a whole host of reasons, in addition to being low effort and inflammatory. And again, the mistake here would be to actually argue the point, because none of this is at all valid: he's provided no actual argument for the similarity between what he claims is the OP's argument and socialism, but in fact he is lying about what the OP's argument even is. At no point in the essay did BJ say anything about forcing anyone to post anything; in fact, he concluded that we should do nothing at all, because this behavior is self-destructive.
I stand by my original claim: That comment contained no argument at all. That is to say, a straightforward interpretation of his message results in an argument he does not "intend" to make and so will not engage productively with, and the message he actually wants to deliver is implied indirectly by interpretation of a highly inflammatory statement he claims not to actually mean. This is not mind-reading on my part, but rather darwin's own explanation of the comment in question.
It seems to me that this is a profoundly shitty method of communicating. It is hard to imagine a more perfect example of the exact opposite of the sort of conversation our rules are meant to encourage. In a mere two sentences, it badly violates most of the rules in the header. When people attempt to engage productively, he claims they've misunderstood him, and that his behavior is totally reasonable, while making vague anodyne statements that imply but never actually commit to reasonableness, while mixing in further sarcastic, passive-aggressive or just generaly smug digs at them for not understanding how obviously right he is. This encourages them to continue engaging and generally results in frustration and hostility, which he paints as unreasonable aggression on their part.
And again, I emphasize that this is how Darwin opens conversations, and that comments of this nature were the norm. We've looked at a mere five threads, and four of them contained multiple instances of this behavior. Darwin was absurdly prolific; I'm confident I can present you with an arbitrary number of examples.
...You wrote more, and I intend to reply to it, but I'm past 10k characters and would like to see if this changes your assessment any. I'll break it here.
My eyes quickly glaze over any trans discussion, but I think there’s less than a 1% chance of guesswho being darwin, and you can quote me on that. He’s an antagonistic progressive, he's got progressive stylistic ticks, that’s basically the extent of the similarity. Other arguments include: as you say, darwin was prolific, why would he even use an alt, and keep it secret, after he did leave that time he was banned, just to make a few random comments. It's not parsimonious.
He did get a lot of AAQC. So you'll have to concede these aren't his best arguments, at least.
There’s low-effort, and there’s content-free. Strictly low-effort posts are only really bad if they express a very common idea (for the sub), imo. As to ‘inflammatory’, it is just a function of a commenter’s ideological distance. We need to tolerate inflammation, as it is a key aspect of the body's immune defenses.
Disagree, he does endorse the interpretation partly with:
This is getting into way too many details of one argument. Our fundamental disagreement is whether his behaviour here is bad. What is the rule, applicable to all commenters, that he broke ? “The defendant made a short comment that implied a certain argument, but then later only partially endorsed it, and in further clarifications it became clear that he endorsed another argument more”
The fact that he is incorrect from our pov, that ‘the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it.’ is weak, is not for us to punish (through force).
You are using his own, extensive clarifications to catch him in a contradiction, when they put the lie to your other accusations, that he was just sniping, that he wasn’t engaging. Wouldn’t it be worse if he had not explained what he meant?
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