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I don't think you understood what I meant on this part. My point was that the person you're directly taking to always deserves more deference than a public figure you're referring to in the third person to guard the light:heat ratio of the conversation. If you and I were talking about US presidents, and I called Trump and Biden pieces of shit, that wouldn't be great but it'd be much less bad than if I called you specifically a piece of shit. There's just no way we could have a conversation worth much of anything if attacks like that are getting lobbed at the person you're discussing things with.
For the JK Rowling stuff, again, I come back to the hypothetical of a 2A advocate:
-"Biden wants to take all our guns!"
-"No he doesn't"
-"OK but he's the Democratic president, and there are Democratic factions that want to do that"
Stuff like this happens all the time. People rarely get all that fussed over it. The fact that people are trying to attack Darwin for this points me to believe that they just disagreed with him broadly, and then went fishing for anything that could be described as "manipulative".
That's exactly how I understood your argument, but my point is it doesn't work if you accept the logic of Darwin's argument, because in that case it wouldn't be calling you specifically, a piece of shit. You don't even enter the conversation. It's just about people like you, which is not at all connected to you specifically.
Kinda missing the part about backing away to a claim about Biden specifically that they think is more defensible, it turning out to also be also be false, and then saying "it doesn't matter" even though they started the conversation.
I don't think it does, and I don't think anyone would say "you only hate him because he's right wing" if you got fed up talking to a guy like that after many conversations over the course of several years.
The 2A advocate would back up to claiming that Biden probably did want to take everyone's guns away, and that his more mild political positions were just a way of being palatable to the broader populace. And even if they don't then Biden's at least carrying water for the more extreme factions that want to do so. This is symmetrical to what Darwin is claiming with JK Rowling.
It's not false at all that at least some factions of the Republican party want to eliminate trans people, although this need not necessarily mean "death camps". For some it probably does mean death camps though.
I don't really see your issue with Darwin here overall:
Is it that he didn't explicitly admit he was wrong about the point on JK Rowling? Nobody every does this in debates, especially once things get heated. At best you'll get implicit acceptance as they move to different points.
Is it that his original post had an offhanded bailey in it that he abandoned to focus on defending the motte instead? See my prior post: yeah, it's a bit annoying, but it's very common.
Is it that he didn't bother to defend the bailey even though that's a prime area where Amadan wanted to press him on? You mentioned him saying "it doesn't matter" was a problem, but obviously people shouldn't be forced to defend dumb positions if they'd rather give up and just implicitly accept an L on a given topic.
Still not quite. What's missing is the reasoning for this claims being justified by some passage from Biden's autobiography, the other poster arguing that said passages say no such thing, it turning out that the original poster hasn't even read the autobiography and is blindly repeating completely made up claims, and when that's pointed out he then says "it doesn't matter".
There are some factions that want to ban the whole Gender Affirming Care thing, and abolish all the special accommodations given to trans people. Sure, this is often interpreted by the pro-trans side as eliminationist, though such usage of the word is unconventional, and any honest person participating in a conversation would qualify it properly.
If you actually truly believe that the second sentence is a reasonable thing to say about any non-negligable amount of Republicans, and if you really truly believe there's nothing at all egregious about this conversation, then please step me through some of the other examples of bad posts you've given. Why is it ok to say "some unspecified amount of Republicans want to eradicate trans people", but somehow wrong to say "Ilhan Omar is a foreign agent" (not to mention it being magically ok to say that about Trump for years upon years)? What's so wrong about that AAQC from gattsuru? You're acting like it should be obvious but not only do I see nothing wrong with it, it does look like a good example of an actual AAQC.
JK RowlingI don't mind Darwin's opinions, just his debating tactics, but you seem to be objecting to the content of people's beliefs, which is a weird approach for me in itself, but combined with saying the content of Darwin's post is fine, actually, it's incomprehensible to me.
Absolutely false. Plenty of people do. I'm sure you do so quite often yourself. Just off the top of my head, you didn't react to the link where GuessWho admits he's Darwin by saying "pff, that doesn't matter".
What is more rare, and should not be expected of others, is changing your mind about your broader worldview during the course of the debate, but conceding basic factual statements is a prerequisite for having a reasonable conversation. If you don't have that, you're not even in a conversation, you're in Monty Pythons Argument Clinic
An implicit L would be just dropping the topic of JK Rowling altogether, not trying to claim he didn't actually mean her specifically when he said "people like JK Rowling", then claiming he has good reasons to believe she actually has more extreme views than she lets on, based on her portrayal of trans people in her books, and then claiming none of it matters when it turns out he was wrong about her books. An explicit L should definitely be expected from a reasonable person, when they make a mistake of this magnitude.
Also, the moment you call it a motte and bailey, you concede the entire issue, in my opinion. Motte and Bailey is a dishonest, bad faith, and manipulative debating tactic, that's just an objective fact. As to whether he should be forced to defend the bailey, no - there should be no bailey! The whole spirit of this place is that any position that comes out of your mouth is one that you should be willing to defend. It's in the website's sidebar:
It's in the freakin' domain name!.
If you're still thinking "what's the big deal?", it's that his wasting people's time. I don't mind drive-by trolls like AlexanderTurok or BurdensomeCount, because they're signaling clearly that 90% of their content is just bants. I roll my eyes and move on, or I join in on the banter, either way I know what I'm getting into. OTOH, If I'm joining what appears to be a reasonable conversation I want to take it seriously. I don't particularly care for how outlandish an idea is, how absurd and obviously wrong it seems, if it is held sincerely, I want to see what makes the person tick, or to see if I'm missed some critical facts about the world if my worldview is so distant from their's. When it turns out I'm not in a conversation, but a 5D word-judo fight where it can easily turn out that "people like JK Rowling" doesn't mean "a group of people that JK Rowling is a central example of", but "a tiny subgroup that is in the same cluster as JK Rowling, because said cluster is defined to span half of the entire society, if not more", then I'm going to feel like an idiot for jumping into it to begin with.
You claim this sort of behavior is very common, but this is clearly disproven by the fact that people we able to recognize Darwin under his new alt, specifically by his particular brand of dishonesty, bad faith, and manipulation.
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I think it's sort of different in that the accusations that Darwin threw around were much more inflammatory than in the 2A hypothetical: 'JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people' is much more strong than 'Biden wants to take your guns'. He used to use words like 'eradicate', 'racist', etc. a lot. Saying transphobic or racist things, or performing transphobic or racist acts, is literally illegal in Rowling's and my country. Those are strong accusations to throw around!
In that context, it's really pretty bad to throw that heat when you have no evidence, the existing evidence is exactly contra-indicative (Rowling had been reasonably supportive of trans people at the start) and you openly admit you have no interest in actually looking through what she said.
Then moving to 'people like Rowling' as in the quote "people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people" strikes me as broadening that brush rather than narrowing it.
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