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>>You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious i

>>You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious infringement on those rights. I would be happy to debate my use of the term natural rights, but you're moving the goalposts. Let's reach a resolution on the previously discussed point before moving to another. The previous point was that dismissing a person, and their argument, merely for their comment containing one of a set of blacklisted words, like "pernicious" or "female", is absurd. It's obviously anti-intellectual and trying to defend this kind of conduct shows bad faith. >>This is not to say that you cannot use the word "pernicious", but your use of it is remarkable. Again, moving the goalposts. Your argument is not the same thing as the one you defended earlier.

wtallis 9y ago
> Again, moving the goalposts. I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. But when your comment has multiple red flags and little substance, the scales don't tip in your favor. There is absolutely no goalpost-moving involved in expecting your comment to have sufficient substance to balance out the rhetoric. In a discussion about details of tax policy, I consider it a red flag when someone starts ranting about "natural rights"; they're clearly trying to drag things off-topic, and probably not in a particularly enlightening direction. When the comment goes downhill from there, I'm quite justified in rendering a judgement. There's nothing anti-intellectual about this. It's just a logical reaction to your inability to stay on-topic and level-headed for two whole sentences. It would be anti-intellectual or at least inadvisably closed-minded to filter out your comments with a blind grep-like process for merely mentioning certain words. But the Bayesian process of reading until I understand what you're trying to say is the only sane way to interact with an Internet that contains an effectively limitless supply of crackpot ideas.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >>I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. Discussions of a social and economic nature are already hard enough to navigate constructively as it is. I don't feel like dealing with shifts of goalposts on top of it. It just gets far too tedious. So with all due respect, given your admission that you are changing the subject, I'm going to end our discussion. Not even because what you're doing is necessarily unreasonable. It's just too time-consuming for me to deal with.

wtallis 9y ago

> Again, moving the goalposts. I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. But when your comment has multiple red flags and little substance, the scales don't tip in your favor. There is absolutely no goalpost-moving involved in expecting your comment to have sufficient substance to balance out the rhetoric. In a discussion about details of tax policy, I consider it a red flag when someone starts ranting about "natural rights"; they're clearly trying to drag things off-topic, and probably not in a particularly enlightening direction. When the comment goes downhill from there, I'm quite justified in rendering a judgement. There's nothing anti-intellectual about this. It's just a logical reaction to your inability to stay on-topic and level-headed for two whole sentences. It would be anti-intellectual or at least inadvisably closed-minded to filter out your comments with a blind grep-like process for merely mentioning certain words. But the Bayesian process of reading until I understand what you're trying to say is the only sane way to interact with an Internet that contains an effectively limitless supply of crackpot ideas.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. Discussions of a social and economic nature are already hard enough to navigate constructively as it is. I don't feel like dealing with shifts of goalposts on top of it. It just gets far too tedious. So with all due respect, given your admission that you are changing the subject, I'm going to end our discussion. Not even because what you're doing is necessarily unreasonable. It's just too time-consuming for me to deal with.