I was responding to some plain old bulverism/gaslighting. It’s toxic, and I’d prefer that we don’t ‘smoothly’ gloss over that. If you hadn’t led with “I think

I was responding to some plain old bulverism/gaslighting. It’s toxic, and I’d prefer that we don’t ‘smoothly’ gloss over that. If you hadn’t led with “I think you have missed the point, the GP’s argument wasn’t...”, it would have gone a lot smoother. The rest of what you said stood entirely without them. Can you say what value those phrases added other than to just undermine the person you were responding to as a way of establishing your interpretation as ‘correct’? I see I’ve been flagged for asking if you were gaslighting, but frankly the comment I was replying to fell foul of the site guidelines too. Perhaps I should have just flagged it, but my sense is that it wasn’t enough to warrant that. You can interpret the question about ‘gaslighting’ as some great insult, or you can take it as real observation about a toxic conversational gambit that it seems like you unintentionally engaged in. Your choice.