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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Focusing on a single person for no reason to expose them as a bad faith actor is trolling. People are not ants in an antfarm. Not giving a person any time to respond at all before you make a top-level post detailing how wrong they are and pointing them out by name over and over is not the act of a person engaging in a debate. It's rude, tactless and unnecessarily aggressive. But it's clear to me that you are either unable to understand how your actions can affect other people or simply don't care. You wrap it all up in nice-seeming language but it's not. These are things you do to people you see as enemies. We're supposed to be having discussions and arguments with people that we may disagree with but they're still people. You are not treating people who disagree with you as people, you're treating them like they're enemies that need to be dissuaded or dismantled. Charity: from where I'm sitting you give it to no one.

You're losing me on the definition of trolling you're using. I don't see anything wrong with exposing someone's mistake, especially if I am emphatically accommodating rehabilitation ("it's fair to conclude DradisPing was mistaken. If so, I will preemptively praise them for editing their post and admitting their error."). I don't see the problem with this approach because I explicitly invite others to do the same to me. A good example of where I was scrutinized and a situation I wish happened more often is this post by @Fruck where they ask genuinely thoughtful and penetrating questions about why I had the beliefs I had. I walked away grateful for that exchange because it prompted productive introspection on my end.

If someone pointed out a mistake I made and gave me space to either correct it or justify it, I can't think of a reason why I would register that as a hostile act.