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Notes -
When I said:
I was referring to the likes of TTV, not the commenters here who stated agreement TTV and similar are dumb, or called them extremists as you have. (I wouldn’t call them “extremists” myself, in that these views are extremely common.)
I’m not sure how many comments you’ve read here or in the past, but several posters have said things like “I can’t blame those who believe the plot” or “even if the voting plot wasn’t real, it was still rigged.” Some of those stances have been more reasonable than others.
@Walterodim gave you many disclaimers and was quite clear that he wasn't speaking for those people. You ignored the substance of his comment entirely, choosing instead to essentially frame it as one of many questing tendrils of the election denial kraken.
When someone says "I don't agree with X but here are my beliefs," and your only response is to discuss how their own beliefs contribute to X (or the discussion around X), you're engaging with the comment on the meta-level rather than the object level, which is really only valid and useful if the commenter seems to be operating in bad faith.
It's like if I said "I'm no vegetarian but there was a year where I couldn't afford meat, and my health did fine" and you, a carnivore, respond with a list of bad arguments vegetarians use. It's neither here nor there. Walter isn't the representative of all election deniers, and doesn't seem to be the election denial equivalent of a secret vegetarian looking for converts.
Keep in mind he said:
Which is a little annoying when myself and others have not done that here.
Both he and I made some general remarks about what we don’t like, in addition to addressing the specific points made here.
@Walterodim presents his concerns well and I believe I commended him off the bat for that.
I’ll also note my points in the comment you don’t like apply to both sides of the aisle, since it’s not like the left hasn’t had its issues with imprecise language and unjustified claims of election illegitimacy.
He said that as a contrast to his beliefs about the election--namely that it wasn't stolen. It was describing his own stance on the issue, not accusing anyone else of that behavior.
But you didn't address his specific points. That's the issue. If you had, then after that point it would be much more permissible to discuss the meta level. Jumping straight to the meta is counterproductive and just a couple steps away from accusing someone of bad faith.
Not really. When you reply to someone with "we should do better" you're implicitly accusing them of being part of the problem. If you had said anything at all that actually acknowledged his point, that would be something, but the way you worded it:
you're basically saying, "What you're saying may be correct, but it's meaningless, because your side is still wrong." If you think he's intentionally covering for his side, make that case. If not, just directly address the argument, which already had plenty of disclaimers against the extremists.
The “we should do better” bit was attempting to agree with his overall point that we should do elections better, not telling him to do better.
I could have made that clearer, but perhaps consider you’re misreading me worse than you think I’m misreading him.
Let’s also not accuse me of “jumping to the meta” in a convo that was already a couple of rounds deep. I agree with the substance of his points on the object level. Where we seem to disagree is on the meta issue of framing, and perhaps attributing how much distrust even came from real vs. imagined issues.
And, for the record, I don’t actually place him on the “other side” in that he and I agree far more than we disagree and he seems highly reasonable.
Seriously?
I think just about anyone would read these two lines as connected, and therefore both referring to the same thing. That is, we can and should do better about conspirational thinking etc.
This is a clear enough implication that if that is truly not what you meant I wouldn't describe it as me "misreading" your comment but rather simply as you miscommunicating.
I don't think you're misreading Walter either, I just think you failed to engage with him. If you did mean to say "we can and should do election security better," that does help, but your comment was still an attempt to make Walter answer for the actions and views of his more extreme counterparts.
OK, well what you said to him was the opposite, unless by "object level" you refer solely to verifiable data and not to his actual object level arguments.
I'm not really interested in litigating this more, I just found your "we can and should do better" comment annoying and preachy. If that was meant to be about election security, then it shouldn't have been placed in the middle of a bunch of other "we can and should do better" statements which were referring to election denialism.
You can call me a liar if you want after I acknowledged I was insufficiently clear with my brevity.
I don’t significantly disagree with Walter and I was focused on routing things to where I do disagree, which wasn’t intended to be criticizing him.
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