Frampy

Very well, perhaps now you have been enlightened you would care to address my point?

Lol, fair point, although I was thinking in the other direction - I may not be able to define a respectable part of the internet, but I can definitely think of areas that are less reputable than others. The chans, etc. And it is pretty much exclusively in those places I have been able to find Scott's irl details.

Yes what a remarkable cavalcade of coincidence your life is. And why look at that, you were so busy marvelling over your ability to engage left wing dialogue in the past five years without ever hearing of dog whistles that you plum forgot to address anything I said! What a lark. Let's just pretend I said SA's writing is full of dog whistles and didn't say 'dog whistles, aka coded language, is entirely unfalsifiable and in direct opposition to the principle of good faith argument' - after all, we are already pretending to be engaging arguments in good faith.

Look up the definition of dog whistles then, and discover they mean 'talking in coded language that means one thing to an outside audience and another to the inner circle'. Pretending you don't understand a decades old political term so you can ignore an argument is also not going to engender the good faith dialogue you claim to desire, by the way.

And what was your point about emotionally charged language? Aside from that you don't like it?

I think the words going unsaid here are 'if you look in the right places', probably because the right places in this situation are not places respectable people want to associate with (for good reason).

Your attempt to rewrite the 'when I was young and stupid' excerpt, where you missed half the point of the piece, excised most of the words and declared him clearly not a good writer. Despite his writing being the reason he was even getting a nyt profile in the first place. It can't be that his writing speaks to people in a way you don't get, he's obviously a bad writer and all of those public intellectuals who are supporting him are... Not critical enough?

As for unfalsifiable, you claim there are dog whistles in every second sentence SA writes, and dog whistles are, by definition, unfalsifiable. You can claim anyone can see it if they look critically enough because if someone suggests they have looked critically and found nothing, you can simply claim they didn't do it right and mosey on. Dog whistles are also, by the way, fundamentally incompatible with the principle of good faith you claim to want to prosper. It's an interesting conceit, I'll give you that.

I will defend anyone who wants to speak and discuss things openly, but I will do so according to my principles, not theirs, and there is no hypocrisy in doing so. If you would defend a Christian's or Muslim's right to their beliefs without giving away all your possessions or travelling to Mecca then you are in the same boat. The values I would hold in a perfect world can be impediments in this one, especially when they are used to push orthogonal values.

More importantly though, I like Scott, but I think he is preposterously naive and friendly to a fault. And I think that has been weaponised against him countless times in the past, and is being weaponised against him now. And nothing makes me angrier than seeing friendly, charitable people being taken down by the vindictive and unscrupulous.

I don't see any problem with criticising racism either, I just object to the attempts to paint them as violent while in the next breath pretending the Floyd riots were peaceful.

Proof I was right - you don't like SA therefore his writing is bad and it has a secret evil message (never mind you couldn't even understand his point when you tried to write like him in another thread) and a 'critical' reading would validate your view, which is entirely unfalsifiable.

You aren't missing anything, there is no logic here, only ideology.

Yeah, that's how the left operates now. There are no facts, the only truth is they only operate in good faith and their opponents only operate in bad faith. Therefore anything they say or do is just and anything their opponents say or do is evil.

Peaceful marches become nazi rallies while arsonist riots are stirring protests. Scott Alexander is nice to the point of stupidity, but he is the enemy therefore his actions are inherently nefarious, while the nyt - who recently accused Noam Chomsky and a black academic of white supremacy - become saints harassed by evil incels.

A hacker news thread about it spends god knows how long arguing about the definition of ad hominem, and even though the leftist is just plain fundamentally incorrect they refuse to back down and accuse others of bad faith for not buying their fantasy definition.