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Yet again you are not responding in good faith. You defend your own admitted bad faith as a “misstep” but the other person’s alleged bad faith as “with intent”. Surely this is textbook bad faith.


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I don't think so. The comment I responded to showed up in a thread of more than a 1000 others talking about the very things I mentioned. If you don't assign any intent here it's just someone cruising over the entire context of this conversation, picking a side (without any supporting evidence for why they chose their interpretation, mind you), and then using it justify making a fairly extreme comment. And then they extend it even further into "you know this could also lead to a murder so now your actions support killing children".

If any of {"the information is public/protected under the First Amendment", "Elon is suing to harass this person", "Elon is just straight up lying about the incident", "the attack has nothing to do with the account", "this is something Elon actually said he supports in the past"} are true the point being made changes dramatically. I don't think any of them have been settled at all. I'm sure 'AlchemistCamp has opinions on them as do I but in situations like these it's generally appropriate to make comments taking this uncertainty into account. Like, it could even be a curious comment, "it seems like this person's account is actively harming Elon's family, why would you possibly want to send money to fund it?", but as it stands right now it just jumps immediately into making the conversation worse.

On the flip side, I feel the problems in my comment, which I freely accept (…though not as bad faith), do not actually significantly alter its meaning. Nor do I think it ignores surrounding context like the comment I replied to did. My point was "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person's actions" and I wrote "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person" and I feel that this is something a reasonable person could end up doing, even if it's obviously not correct. Perhaps I'm missing what led you to focus on that part in particular, rather than the rest of the comment, where I feel the meat of it lies?


FYI I read the first sentence of your reply and stopped.

Your loss.

On the contrary. Reading it would have been my loss.

Both your initial comment and the first paragraph of this one are so uncharitable to me that it’s difficult to respond but here goes:

1) Contrary to your initial claims, I made an ethical criticism of a a behavior not a person (and even explicitly clarified this in a sibling comment)

2) The discussion about SLAPP was an off-topic tangent to the primary conversation of the account suspension and the security risks the anti-doxxing rule addressed

Bringing the discussion from the tangent thread to the primary topic is an improvement, not a worsening of the discussion.

3) Your implication that I “cruised over the entire” context of the thread of more than 1000 others comments to make snap posting is false on two counts. There were fewer than 1000 comments at the time and I actually had read over a hundred and already commented elsewhere first.

4) My position isn’t even close to extreme. Funding someone who is regularly de-anonymizing and broadcasting people’s real-time location coordinates against their wishes, despite being fully aware that doing so presents a security risk is morally reprehensible to many, many people—an important bit of context you yourself seem to have worked hard “to ignore”, in your own terminology.

You’ve made repeated made long-winded, meandering complaints about my critical 3-sentence comment, but at the least you’ll have to grant my comment didn’t make untrue assumptions about the other poster’s process of reading the thread, their frame of mind, their good faith in approaching the discussion, their reasoning process or their opinions.

I criticized only the specific course of action the commenter said they were planning.


We have the benefit of hindsight on this particular incident, which I think strengthens my point: it seems very likely that Elon was being purposefully misleading about the circumstances surrounding this incident, that they did not actually endanger his child, and that the ElonJet account had nothing to do with Elon's encounter with this person. I think it is reasonable to say your comment was on topic. However, I strongly disagree with your characterization that you "brought the conversation back on topic". Considering that there was already evidence on the day this was posted that Elon was acting with intentions other than genuine concern for the safety of his child, I think a "is Elon trying to get rid of an account he doesn't like?" comment thread is very reasonable and eminently on-topic. When Google cancels their social media product because "they are refocusing priorities" a thread about "hey I heard they had major security issues with the product, so they probably canned it rather than dealing with the fallout of a data breach" is totally fine, even if the official blog post mentions nothing of the sort.

Actually, if you came into the comment thread where a dozen people were already discussing this possibility, and just left a reply to one of the comments of something along the lines of "oh I guess Google thinks social is too hard, they want to focus on Android now"…that's kind of weird, right? This thread was operating under the assumption that Elon was basically lying, and trying to intimidate the ElonJet guy. The person who was going to fund him was clearly doing it because he thought he was giving money to the little guy standing up to the SLAPP abuser. When I said you waltzed in it's that you just came with "I believe every single word from Elon's side of the story and this happens to mean that you are funding a terrible thing". That was not the assumption that this thread was operating under. You can disagree with that assumption but you didn't go "guys why do you even think this is a SLAPP lawsuit?", you went "why are you funding a doxxer who might murder children". How is this an improvement to the discussion?


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