> You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, I did not. I already explained why I

> You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal. (Well, almost. As I mentioned elsewhere, there are costs to changing a law, so actually whether something is legal now does have some effect on whether it should be legal next year as well. But that wasn't my point.) > you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal, I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal. (General point: there may be only one thing that you want to talk about, but that doesn't oblige your interlocutor to talk about only that thing. And, more specifically, if in talking about that one thing you say things that are misleading, it's reasonable for the other guy to point out that you did so.) > and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion. I did not. I disagree with you about whether everything posted on a blog belonging to a government department "is a government opinion". There is no pretence involved. > You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal (There is, obviously. Also, I remark once again that "making incest illegal" is not an accurate characterization.) > as if there was no cost of doing otherwise I absolutely did not; I acknowledged that first-cousin marriage is a bad idea and that it would be better if people didn't do it and that it increases the frequency of genetic problems in resulting children. Saying "doing X has costs" is not remotely the same thing as saying "not doing X has no costs". It's a tradeoff, like everything else in life. > and pretended in your most recent message that you didn't do that. I did not. > You need to read a wider set of media. Maybe I do, maybe not, but you have absolutely no information about what set of media I read. You need to stop translating everything you read into the stupidest possible one-bit black-and-white "everything about X is good" / "everything about X is bad" version of itself.