Presumably you are referring to PommeDeTerre's comment as "middlebrow dismissal" and I don't believe his intent was to sidetrack the debate with semantic and pe

Presumably you are referring to PommeDeTerre's comment as "middlebrow dismissal" and I don't believe his intent was to sidetrack the debate with semantic and pedantic details. His comment is a new branch in the comment tree. If you find this branch uninteresting you're free to not follow it. Sometimes some really interesting conversations appear a few branches deep in the comment trees that are completely off-topic. I know where you're coming from and I've seen people use that "middlebrow dismissal" tactic you've described when passionately debating. I totally don't think that was PommeDeTerre's intent. It looked to me that he just believed that the examples akkartik were bad enough to warrant pointing out. He didn't attempt to tie that into completely dismissing akkartik whole comment. And for the record, I don't agree with PommeDeTerre's comment at all because I think he missed the point akkatrik was making when he listed his examples.