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Oh well! One option would be to report it, block me and move on. Complaining about votes is the epitome of futility.
But if you're so inclined. Do you think I'm upvoted because of that last sentence, irrespective of it, or in spite of it? No doubt your ego must press you to feel it's not the latter – which would discredit me, my argument and the apparent community consensus, validating you both morally and intellectually. Indeed, this is basically what you proceed to say; btw, I've written this entire response before finishing reading yours.
I have an admission to make. I like to insert a mild ad hominem jab into a beatdown which is otherwise designed to be empirically, logically and rhetorically nigh-unassailable (yes, yes, cringe, tips fedora, whatever, it's nothing special but I do like having this skill) so that my opponent sees confirmation of his suspicions, pounces on it, exiting the topic into meta discussion, and therefore demonstrates he has no remaining object level counterarguments – effectively conceding the point.
And when an opponent does have both an object-level case to make and enough restraint/self-confidence to stay on the supposedly important topic, ignoring the low-hanging fruit of a legalistic call-out that'd score him a win in a school debate club – this creates an opportunity for authentic human communication where both sides may learn something new and true, instead of wading through the mirror labyrinth of ego defenses.
It is my sincere belief that such opt-out baiting should be a widely used practice for filtering out epistemic terrorists and building a high-trust environment – something we can observe EAs suffer from lacking.
Mods won't endorse it, sadly.
(Still haven't read the rest of your post).
Ok, done. It's not quite what I've predicted but close enough. We are an echo chamber so that's why my post gets upvotes.
I will keep making these arguments and pushing them into the mainstream. If you truly believe they constitute an X-risk factor, and ever feel like addressing their «numerous weaknesses», please don't feel limited by the need to retaliate at me for my rudeness by «not humoring» them or something. The future of humanity is at stake, you know!
You're right, the mods aren't going to endorse tactically baiting people to try to weed out the undesirables.
"Are you okay?" was borderline and I almost gave you a warning, but we don't actually mod every statement that might be a little more snide than it needs to be. I'm more unhappy with you openly admitting that you insert ad hominems just to troll your opponents into losing it. You tend to get slightly more slack because you are generally a high effort poster with a lot of AAQCs, but now I'm going to be less chill about this sort of thing in the future.
That's fine, it's about time I improve my technique; it may be interesting to substitute ad hominem with some obvious fallacy that cannot offend (and is immaterial to the broader argument).
Your characterization isn't very fair – «just to troll your opponents into losing it» suggests that there's mendacity and some trolling effort to push them over the edge, whereas what's really happening, IMO, is they're given a good-faith response plus an opportunity to cheaply dismiss it on legalistic grounds. Their emotions don't really concern me, and for all I know they feel very smug and content when calling out a fallacy. Win-win, really!
But okay.
Consider, though, that if you start discriminating against my lines that are otherwise allowed, you'll have failed in about the same way this guy did.
I'm not threatening to discriminate against lines that are otherwise allowed. We exercise some subjectivity in enforcement. This has always, explicitly been the case (hence people periodically complaining that long-time good posters get cut more slack, and our response being "Yes, and?") I'm saying you have burned some of the goodwill that until now gave you more slack.
That's cool! Privilege spoils, and also makes one a target of contempt.
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