No, not relevant. They read a book. They could have summarized the relevant points of the book... but they didn't. They could have given the gist of the argu

No, not relevant. They read a book. They could have summarized the relevant points of the book... but they didn't. They could have given the gist of the argument of the book... but they didn't. They gave a link to a 170,000 word long book - and nothing more. Seriously, how many people are going to go read it? Very few. How many are going to read it in time to say anything relevant to the discussion here? Zero. So dropping a link to a book that size functions as an end-of-conversation move. It says "you can't argue with my unstated position until you've read this" (whether or not that was the post writer's intent). That doesn't make for a healthy conversation. For that reason, I call it out when I see it. [Editing to add: It's even worse if you think in terms of time. How long would it take the poster to give a summary? Ten minutes? Well, how long would it take me to read the book? But it's worse, because more than one person read the post. How long would it take, total, for all of them to read the book? So it's really, really, really wasteful of peoples' time to just drop a link instead of writing the summary.]