> He did not advocate a policy, but you took his comment as advocating an extreme policy.

That's pedantically true, and more honestly false.

Are you honestly going to claim that his description of "putting off victims" advocates for no position? That's ridiculous. He explicitly said ... which is generally thought to be not a good thing.

Are you next going to claim that he thinks putting off victims is not a good thing... but he isn't really advocating against punishing fraudsters even if it "puts off" victims?

And this is all ignoring the point that his claim was false.

Honestly, I find this nit-picking to be utterly ludicrous, to the point of irrational.

> Are you honestly going to claim that his description of "putting off victims" advocates for no position?

No specific policy, certainly. There are many policies consistent with what he said. I gave one already; another would be we should punish false accusations of sexual assault, but not as severely as sexual assault itself.

But you leapt to the most indefensible one. And you didn't even seem to notice that you were making this leap. I don't think it's nitpicking of me to point this out.

> But you leapt to the most indefensible one.

Nonsense.

His position was that any punishment of false claims was "putting off" victims from making real claims.

Which is what I reacted to.

Given the upvotes for my position and the downvotes for yours, I suspect the majority of people came to the same conclusion I did.

Please stop grasping at straws. Your insistence on taking me at an extreme position while accusing me of the same is unsupported by facts.

> His position was that any punishment of false claims was "putting off" victims from making real claims.

Not true. He was replying to a post that said "False accusations should be punished with the same penalty as the accuser tried to put upon the innocent." He said "This has the side-effect..." The referent of "this" is clearly not "any punishment of false claims".

And even if true, that is still not a policy proposal. I've given two alternative interpretations of the original comment. Here's a third: I have no particular policy proposal myself, but I wonder whether you've thought through the implications of yours?

> downvotes

Not that it matters, but right now my comments are all upvoted/neutral.

> Your insistence on taking me at an extreme position

I don't think we disagree on what your position is? We just disagree about whether or not you're correct.

That is, I'm accusing you of accusing peteretep of making a specific policy proposal. You insist that your accusation is correct. So I don't think I'm taking you at a position that you'd call extreme; I think I'm taking you at a position that you actually openly hold. If you disagree then we're wildly talking past each other.

> I don't think we disagree on what your position is?

Yes, we do. Go back and read the history. I started off with a particular position, that you then misconstrued, and mis-characterized.

> I think I'm taking you at a position that you actually openly hold

No, you're not. You've managed to twist what I say, and my defense of my position, to an extreme position.

My position is that people should be punished for breaking the law. And, that saying such punishment (whatever the form) somehow "puts off" innocent people from making claims is wrong.

So I think I've been pretty clear that I've been taking about what peteretep originally said versus what you think he originally said. E.g. "I'm accusing you of accusing peteretep of..."

And I think you've been pretty explicitly talking about what he originally said. E.g. "His position was that..."

But now you seem to be denying that you said anything about what he originally said, or you seem to think that what you said about what he said isn't relevant, or... I don't know. Your comment does not make sense to me. All I can think is that you seem to be mixing meta-levels.

Anyway, I'm not exactly proud of how easily I get sucked into crap like this, so I'm going to try to tap out after this comment.

> My position is that people should be punished for breaking the law. And, that saying such punishment (whatever the form) somehow "puts off" innocent people from making claims is wrong.

So long as enforcement does not perfectly avoid false positives even in beginning prosecution (even if no false convictions occur) it increases the expected cost of a true report, and is a rational disincentive.

It may be that the particular punishment regime minimizes this cost and/or has benefits that offset the cost, but it's implausible that any real punishment scheme could avoid it altogether.