I cited it as further supporting evidence for why your backtracking about scope was unconvincing, not the primary reason for the reading. With or without gorf's post, it is simply not reasonable to read your claim that "the mainstream media, social media, and all 3 branches of government all worked in concert to try to tell people to hate this man" as having the limited scope that you did not imply until several exchanges after being called out on overreach, which makes the claims about scope come off as backpedaling. But sure, let's say that we had a communication breakdown. As I said previously, it's not worth further derailment.
There is an expression I'd like to bring up though: "Communication is not about what you intend, it is about what you convey". Does that ring a bell? To clarify, I am not being catty, I am legitimately uncertain how widespread this nugget is. Premises that we think are implicit or given might not be recognized by the people who hear what we say. A statement that casts a wide net without qualifiers will inevitably be treated as...well, a hasty generalization that is painting with a broad brush.
For illustrative purposes, let's go back a few years and think about the "Not all men" stuff. Does that miss the point? Yes. Is it also, however, an understandable reaction to generalized statements that are easily read as overly broad and accusing a great many people who had no exposure to or interaction with the problem under discussion outside of hearing stereotypes. But then so too does "not all men" come off as being dismissive and downplaying the severity of the issue through deflection. In both cases, what was intended by the speaker did not match what was conveyed by what they said.
And while we've certainly gotten heated again, what I'm trying to say now is that if I can take a step back and say that I may have misunderstood your intent, can you take a step back and acknowledge that your initial statement perhaps did not adequately represent that intent?
I'm afraid you misunderstand my point.
My point was that you have a repeated tendency to declare yourself victorious and the person you're arguing against as "humiliated" or beaten because you left an argument without changing your opinion. And you've pointedly not applied that standard reciprocally. As you have also typically been unconvincing to the people you were arguing with, consistent application of your metric would instead rule that to be a draw or stalemate.
Hence the characterization of you as thinking yourself the Judge/Jury, you're making declarations about the performance of both yourself and the people you argue against and about the outcome of the argument as a whole, as if you were a neutral third party rather than one of the participants who - naturally - have a vested interest in telling themselves that they showed up their opponent.
Moreover, I think you misunderstand what I mean by audience. I'm not "sacrificing truth for the sake of performance". I am saying that an audience - which is to say, a third party uninvested in the outcome - will typically be a better judge of the merits of the participants' arguments than those participants themselves will be.
Put more directly, I think it's pretty safe to say that neither of us much likes the other. (Ironically, this is likely as much because of the personality traits we seem to have in common as it is because of the opinions that we differ on). And neither of us seems to believe that the other even argues in good faith, hence why so much of these spats end up being accusations and implications of spite and dishonesty. (And in case you feel inclined to dispute your participation in that, let me remind you that you just now accused me of "selling out your connection to the truth for the sake of performance", and not actually believing something but running with it as "the most expedient way to reach "right-wing guy wrong' "). And unfortunately that severely compromises our ability to evaluate our own performance in these exchanges. As a matter of principle, you want to believe that you outplayed me, just as I want to believe that I outplayed you. And because of that desire, we are predisposed to believe that we succeeded, especially if the other becomes frustrated into nonresponsiveness.
Hence not being an arbiter of your own performance. That's a tall order at the best of times even for skilled debaters, because there will always be that element of "I want to win" in the background. And it's much harder when the speaker is legitimately ideologically opposed to their opponent, never mind if tempers start to flare.
As a side musing, since we both seem to bring out the worst in each other, at this point I'm legitimately wondering if the mature and healthy thing for us to do would be to just block each other.
