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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

"You know perfectly well" is a way of accusing another person of being disingenuous and this is a step into personal attack.

We don't know what others know—that would require being a mind-reader—and it's against the site guidelines to be aggressive about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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We have a good idea because other people have comment histories and have demonstrated their own linguistic analytical skills on many occasions.

I don't believe that's reliable, but more importantly, you seem to be denying the emotional thrust of what you wrote. "You know perfectly well [etc.]" is an aggressive trope to begin with, and you followed it with other similar thrusts ("Stop trying to", "which is extremely obvious").

Your comment would have been just fine if it started at the "Many posts are being [etc.]"

Weird you are able to characterize 'you know perfectly well' as an aggressive trope without having any special insight into my mental state, but when I characterize something someone else wrote, you want to be all philosophical and say that we can't make any inferences about other people.

My original comment expressed skepticism about the idea that an expressive remark should be interpreted as a formal assertion of fact. I think your efforts at semantic policing are misplaced.

I see how it came across that way, but I was talking about the effects that language like that tends to have, whether it was your intent or not.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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