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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

“Not up for debate” is a much scarier string of words than anything that guy has said.

Debating the meaning of words in order to avoid owning what you explicitly said or supported whenever it's inconvenient should be condemned. What kind of person would be scared by that over someone supporting an advocate of the ethnic cleansing of London?

If someone says a word has a different meaning, then that necessarily affects the meaning of what they said. You are not in a position to assert that your interpretation of their words is more objective than theirs, unless you're explicitly intending to be intellectually dishonest, or come with further evidence proving their intellectual dishonesty.

If you're being intellectually honest, you would explain which parts of the words I quoted is ambiguous instead of questioning my integrity with vague hypotheticals.

I don't need to in order for my comments to be intellectually honest. My prior posts in this thread stand on their own as statements of principle: that declaring an interpretation "not up for debate" is at minimum intellectually empty; I would go further and describe it as both foolish and dangerous.

If you choose a normatively loaded assertion in place of a good-faith argument about meaning, you're not resolving the disagreement; you're simply declaring your own interpretation authoritative, to no end. That's literally how primary school children argue in the school yard.

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