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Comment by scryers_bloom | Hacker News Reader

rayiner does this pretty consistently - strawmanning the argument and acting confused, on most political threads on hn.

I notice he seems to have a GPT-level understanding of issues, offering a thin justifications of his viewpoints, and then just completely ignoring any substantive discussions and instead only engaging in threads where he is "winning".

IIRC he is a lawyer, a field where strategically deploying intellectual dishonesty is particularly advantageous.

That's why I’ve stopped feeding the troll — I just downvote or flag when necessary. It’s a shame because, years ago, he was one of the better commenters on HN.

He's done this since at least 2016 so you can rest assured he's not a bot.

This is a real human being making these apologetics and using classic distraction and whataboutism techniques

Rayiner of 10 years ago started his arguments from axioms other than "the Republican Party is correct" as he does now. I miss old Rayiner. His arguments against the Democratic position on e.g. Citizens United and Bush v. Gore were persuasive back then. Nowadays virtually nothing he says is persuasive, because it's incredibly obvious that he's starting from the position that the Republican Party is correct and working backwards from there.

(He's also getting about as close as you can get to the "out-and-out racism" line as you can get without maybe technically crossing it. Though I think he did cross it when it comes to Irish Catholics.)

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