Seriously? Again? Why exactly is it off-topic? Or rather, by "subthread off-topic", do you mean my comment to which you replied to, or the discussion that deve

Seriously? Again? Why exactly is it off-topic? Or rather, by "subthread off-topic", do you mean my comment to which you replied to, or the discussion that developed below? It appears to me you're unfairly penalizing me, just because the opinions and arguments I express are different from the mainstream (and hence less socially acceptable). Am I wrong about that? Other reasons I can think of: (1) I'm commenting to much. (2) I don't "let the issues go" (i.e. I reply to too many comments); I do that because I think most arguments people respond with are not very sensible. The only real argument is something like "(i) holocaust denial is insulting to holocaust survivors, their relatives and other Jews; (ii) it's more insulting that most other insulting things, because they have PTSD or were brought up/know people who had PTSD; (iii) some violent groups want to use holocaust denial in their propaganda", which is a whole lot of twists and turns just to make sure only holocaust (and no other kind of) denial falls under "criminal". Still, it took a long time to arrive at this argument, and many people's other arguments were rather irrelevant. (3) There are too many up-&down-votes. (4) These kinds of arguments look bad for HN/YC. (5) It's hard for people to read the main thread if there's such a long subthread. But wouldn't this be solved better by having a maximum level of nesting on the main page, with separate pages for loading comments (e.g. Reddit has that). (6) These kinds of discussions are irrelevant and boring, because we've had them before. Then I would hope someone would link to a reasonable, and more importantly complete, argument, so we wouldn't need 50 comments to arrive to something like the argument in (2). (7) It's actually off-topic. But as I recall, my comment was just a reply to the parent comment. I can't be sure any more, because I don't know any more what the parent comment was. I tried to write this response in the nicest tone possible; but because of the nature and context of discussion, I'm worried it will still be perceived as argumentative, or even aggressive. I'm only trying to avoid situations like these in the future; I come here to learn, and I think one of the best ways to learn is by exchanging arguments, and refining them so that you reach the core of the disagreement (i.e. so that you eliminate all the bullshit arguments that follow from logical fallacies or that people use as excuses). But it's hard to do that without what seems like a heated discussion. Maybe I should first try Steelmanning (DH7 in [1]) the arguments in the future, and in general learn to argue better [2]. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/ [2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapo...