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So he's seemingly guilty of mild, year-spanning contradiction, as interpreted by you. I'm not going to waste my time explaining in detail why ashlael's positions are not contradictory, suffice to say you don't have a smoking gun. And all of this has nothing to do with the downvotes you were trying to justify.
You implied he was consensus building, like the post's Red Tribe equivalent. But those posts actually have a consensus to build on. At best he's gathering a coalition of the damned.
The rule against "Consensus building" doesn't have anything to do with how many people one is immediately appealing to. "We (you and I) agree on X" can be an appeal to common knowledge to your opposite number, provided they actually do agree; if you're not sure whether they agree, it's best to phrase it as a question rather than a statement.
"We (me and others, not you) agree on X, so clearly you're the odd one out" is consensus-building, whether the others are specified or not, and whether the others are present or not. Speaking for other people is generally frowned upon.
You genuinely do not appear to understand the rules this place operates under, and you are rounding all disagreement with your flawed understanding to evidence of bias. This makes your arguments against the actual, considerable, and quite damaging bias that does exist counterproductive.
This is not an endorsement of the object-level claim above.
I think you confuse consensus building with appeal to consensus. The latter pits an external authoritative perspective against the opponent, the former excludes a perspective from the debate entirely, and is characteristic of echo chambers.
From the rules:
If you think it helpful to criticize the behavior of the evident majority here, a position I wholeheartedly agree with, then an understanding of the actual meaning of the rules the Mods have put in place and enforce will help you do that more effectively. If you're worried about the rules being used against you, understanding how they work will help you stay on the correct side of them. The mods are remarkable in their good-faith commitment to trying to inculcate the norms that page describes.
The two examples provided by the rules "As everyone knows . . ." and "I'm sure you all agree that . . ." contradict yours "We (me and others, not you) agree on X" . The reader is included in the consensus building.
"starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement." is what I said. The problem is not, referring to other people who disagree. It's assuming we all already agree. And you can't assume we all agree when you're arguing a clear minority position.
There's an easy test available: Ping a mod and ask. They haven't minded clarifying the rules in the past.
appeal to authority: @Amadan ?
This seems like an extremely legalistic argument where you want to argue about which wording is okay and which wording is not okay, but fine:
"As everyone knows"/"We all know/I'm sure you agree" is consensus-building. It assumes that everyone (here) agrees with whatever you're about to say. "Everyone knows Trump is stupid and evil." That's consensus-building, it's trying to quash anyone who might argue otherwise before you've even made your case for Trump being stupid and evil. "We all know HBD is true." Well, no, we do not all know that, it's debatable, even if you think it's beyond question. Even "I'm sure we all agree the Holocaust happened" would probably require us to point out that in fact there are people here who do not agree with that, so if that's what you're arguing, you cannot simply assert it as a known and agreed upon fact. We do not want people to try to assert some uniformity of opinion here, to imply that "everyone is on my side (except maybe ignorant outliers like you)."
I am not going to go back to parse Ashlael's original statement or gattsuru's years-long grudge against him. I don't know if he specifically used consensus-building language, but if he did and we didn't call him out on it, our bad. The fact that you're arguing a minority opinion does not preclude you from trying to assert a (non-existent) consensus. People do that all the time. "Of course Marxism is correct, only people who refuse to look at facts and logic say otherwise." (This was basically Marxbro's entire schtick.) "God is real, we all feel God's presence, nonbelievers are just in denial." Not an argument seen here very often, but it's a popular one with certain Christians and would almost certainly get modded for trying to assert "we all" feel something without justifying it. I don't know what gattsuru is claiming Ashlael was "consensus-building" about, but it has nothing to do with how many people here actually agreed with him or not.
Thank you, and my apologies for the bother.
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