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Sure they can. As long as it was plausible that your primary objection was about plagiarism, you had several people taking your side, and calling others to not dismiss accusations based on tribalism. But now you did literally do the "it's not happening, but if it is, he deserves it" thing.
Nope. I explicitly asked for evidence that the left or breadtube at large was trying to take down IH. One thread on Reddit isn't proof of that.
An active thread where people are coordinating to slander a guy is not evidence of people coordinnating to slander a guy?
In what sense is that "coordinating to slander a guy"? Those people are discussing him and the various memes or jokes he's snuck in as a reference to 4chan humor. Where is the coordinating in that thread? If they believe that the standard of evidence has been met, then why are they not free to discuss it?
These sort of online spaces tend to be more informal. I suppose sometimes they can get on the autistic side, and start doing Gay Ops, but normally it's
- Hey look what this person did!
- You think that's bad? Look at this!
And so on. Even though no one is taking command, dividing tasks among participants, etc., the end result is still a bunch of people working together to find dirt on someone.
Do you remember when someone brought up some weird Bay-Area Rat woman trying to date people via Google Docs, and this whole place suddenly devolved into a knitting circle trying to one-up each other in passing judgement on the woman's life choices? Well, are they not free to discuss it? Sure they are! But just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Okay...and?
I'm reminded of a recent Sam Seder conversation with Jesse Singal, in which the former referred to a publication by Sam Harris in 2004 called "In Defense of Torture". Seder said it was horribly irresponsible in the context of what the US was doing to captured terrorists, but this is precisely how 99% of humans work - you talk about a subject when its relevant, unless you're an academic who explicitly focuses on that. Given that none of the people involved are, I don't see any problem with them doing this.
There are ways of doing things which can make or break them. I recall the incident you're referring to, but not the discourse here. Without checking, I'm assuming there was some rather uncharitable psychoanalyzing of Bay Area Rationalists and women. But the issue there is the uncharitability, not the inherent discussion.
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