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A top level post about an extremely... divisive topic by an account with only 3 prior posts all made 3 years ago?
On the off chance you're not here to stir up shit, I recommend that you please try to be a more active and positively-contributing member of this community before posting top level comments about topics like this.
Contra @Jiro's usual supercilious sneering, when we see a post like this, no one is naive to the likelihood that it's a troll. Some of the people who argue with obvious trolls are just the sort of people who cannot resist responding even to troll-posts. OTOH, if an obvious controversial post is "long and grammatically correct" (in other words, it's actually making a coherent argument), the difference between "troll" and "someone making a sincere if inflammatory argument" is only in what their motivation is, which we generally cannot know.
Yeah, I looked at @DeepNeuralNetwork's history to see if he might be an alt of our old nazi-pedo friend or the other guy who insisted that not granting full adult rights and responsibilities to children is slavery. Is he? shrug Don't think so, doesn't have the same style. Is he a troll writing an effort-post to giggle and see how the Motte will react to "It should be legal to fuck 15-year-olds?" He could be. On the other hand, he might also really believe what he is saying. While I don't agree with his argument, I don't actually think it's insane on the face of it- there are lots of reasons for why the age of consent is the way it is today and not what it was in the 18th century, and overall, his post didn't read like your typical troll who just wants to fuck 15-year-old girls.
One of @ZorbaTHut's explicit goals for the Motte is to enable it to be a place where people can come here with blazing hot takes (sincerely held!) that couldn't find a fair audience anywhere else. Let people post them and argue them and take the brickbats and rotten tomatoes. Yes, sometimes that means enabling trolls who are just here to shit-stir. Of course sometimes those blazing hot takes are things like "Certain people should have bad things done to them," which crosses some other lines. And often those blazing hot takes descend into an exchange of insults and personal attacks, which crosses others.
Moderation has never been flawless here. We have a set of dials we can adjust up or down, and every adjustment has consequences. The OP got reported by several people basically saying "This didn't break the rules but I don't like it." I've seen this a lot lately. I mean... what are we supposed to do about that?
What you are talking about is single issue posters. Many of them are sincere, and really aren't trolls in the sense of shit-stirrers. I would agree that DNN is not an alt of one of those--a single issue poster and a troll are very different, even if they can both be disruptive in their own way.
If he's here to shit-stir (especially if he's doing it to get juicy quotes to make rationalists look bad, he is in fact breaking the rules. He certainly isn't speaking plainly, and if his intention is to get quotes from rationalists, he's not leaving the rest of the Internet at the door either. Don't confuse "it takes human judgment to decide that he's breaking the rules" with "he isn't breaking the rules". Yeah, Zorba wants people to come with hot takes that are sincerely held. This kind of troll's opinions are not sincerely held.
And single issue posters and drive-by trolls both violate "post on multiple subjects". I would also argue that someone who makes a post and never responds to criticisms is violating at least the spirit of the rule about low effort participation, even if the original post did require some effort.
And in response to @ToaKraka:
This kind of trolling may have individual subjects that are discussed "productively", but trolls can cause damage just by changing the emphasis on what is discussed even if each individual instance of a topic is one that we might have discussed anyway. You don't really get productive trolls, you get trolls who are better at causing subtle damage. (And if they're quoting us offsite, that adds a bunch of extra harm that isn't always immediately obvious.)
Is this even still a thing? Where do they post their content? I checked sneer club but they seem to be basically exclusive anti-yud posters at this point.
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Your entire argument is predicated on your ability to read a poster's intent better than we can.
There are few people whose judgment would cause me to second-guess my own, and you aren't one of them.
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Oh I agree it's a legitimate topic for debate with plenty of room for changes in the law outside of "I really want to fuck 15 year olds and you should just let me", and the OP isn't being a blatant troll, but my default assumption when I see a top level post like this is that it's to get responses to share elsewhere about how we're a bunch of evil creeps etc.
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