> "Destroying people with facts and logic" isn't how human psychology works

Completely agree that this isn't how human psychology works. However, in debate (which is what is happening here), facts and logic can indeed be used to vanquish one's counterpart. When the facts are in favour of one side of the debate, it is fairly typical that they will leverage them in the debate. If you observe a debate where one side does not use facts but instead opts for pure rhetoric, it is often (but not always) a sign that they do not have facts on their side. If you ask them about the abstract notion of facts/truth, repeatedly, and the response is, repeatedly, as if they did not see the question, this may be considered another sign.

> ...and without that axiom I think the rest of this analysis falls apart

This is interesting - are you able to articulate how you consider this to be the case?

I in no way considered "Destroying people with facts and logic" to be a key component of my overall argument, it was mostly just an off the cuff bit of snark.

Nah. You were referring to the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and the ease with which they could be dispelled by logic, were they of such little grounding as we say Qanon is. You weren't referring to HN, or any debate in particular; that's a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this site.

Disrupt everything? Software eats the world?

> You weren't referring to HN, or any debate in particular; that's a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Reading someone's mind and then asserting it as what they are doing and knocking that down (a classic strawman argument) is the rhetorical sleight of hand (and also an innate capability that develops from a very young age, as far as I can tell).

In fact, what I was actually referring to was the particular angle I am arguing in this thread, here on HN, an argument that has been opposed by nothing other than rhetoric.

> Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this site.

Framing the argument via semantics (cherry picking one word, that was placed within quotation marks to explictly* indicate that it is being used in a figure-of-speech manner) to (again) turn it into a non-representative proxy of the actual argument and then sidetracking the discussion onto that, is another clever rhetorical slight of hand.

What remains, unaddressed, is the original argument.

The tactics are annoying, but I don't mind so much - seeing them on full, unapologetic display is actually kind of the point of the whole exercise from my perspective.