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Comment by dleary | Hacker News Reader

“Triggered” implies an emotional or irrational overreaction to some stimulus. Describing your opponents as a “cult” also implies that they are non rational.

The GP described opposition to his argument, before it was presented, as coming from triggered members of a cult.

If this is not poisoning the well, what changes to his argument need to be present for it to cross over the line?

How much more clear does it need to be?

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> The GP described opposition to his argument, before it was presented, as coming from triggered members of a cult.

And to rub salt into the wound, he then went on to describe his preference as "the most correct".

I wonder what he primarily programs in.

> I wonder what he primarily programs in.

Let me dissipate your wonderance.

I started my programming life with Delphi and C++ (pre-C++11), and when Delphi IDE became too bloated, I jumped to Python 3.x and didn't take it too seriously until Python 3.6 onwards.

Python?

But it's got all the same footguns that JS has, with fewer features.

If you're used to those footguns, why are you complaining about JS?

Python is even worse than than js. Worse package management, worst static typing feature. I also work in cpp space and I would rank large python code base one the worst to read with

It's not about crossing a line. For it to be poisoning the well it would need to have a characteristic that it simply doesn't have. At no point does the comment attempt to present its detractor's opinions as inherently invalid or worthy of less consideration.

It suggests they are reacting negatively because they are in a cult.

What it literally says is "it's going to feel like I've insulted a cult". It's not a very idiomatic sentence, which to me suggests the writer is not a native English speaker, so we need to interpret more liberally.

>my comment will trigger negatively a ton of developers, because talking about JS like this it's going to feel like I've insulted a cult. Let me be clear this is not my intention.

The salient points are:

* A lot of developer may take offense to these comments.

* "Because it's like I've insulted a cult" -> "Because it's like I'm killing the sacred cow." -> "Because it's like I'm trying to be intentionally offensive about something that's off-limits."

* This is not their intention.

If you take into account the entire paragraph I think the intent is quite clear. "If you take offense to my comments please keep in mind that I'm not trying to be intentionally offensive, I'm just expressing my personal opinion." I'll grant you that it's somewhat clumsily communicated, but that's not that surprising if ivanmontillam is not a native speaker. I think you latched on too strongly to specific words, instead of taking in the general message.

Thank you for teaching me better english dear Sir.

(I speak natively Spanish)

No problem. By the way, Spanish is also my first language.

I’m surprised this rethorical trick is so hard to recognize. It is as old as the hills and you will hear it from people from conspiracy nuts to priests, salesmen to politicians. So it is a good thing to understand and be aware of.

The crux is the speaker preventatively discredit any objection. In this case by suggesting they are irrational and emotonal.

“People will complain/get angry/be triggered by my theory X because theory Y is a dogma/cult/holy cow/religion/what they have been told to believe by mainstream media” - the point is of course that an objections to theory X might be perfectly resonable and fact based. Objections will tend to be defensive (“its not a cult, it is mathematically proven that…”) making them seem weaker.

If you want continue discussing this then please address the points I made rather than insisting on the same point I already addressed. If you won't then I'll simply stop responding and assume you're just acting in bad faith.

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