The majority of my post consisted of specific empirical predictions which were not about the contents of your head. Whether I am mistaken about why you are doing what you’re doing changes nothing about what the effects of your behaviour are likely to be. To the extent it was about the contents of your head it was addressing a conflict I perceived between the likely outcomes of your behavior and the goals you have elsewhere explicitly given for that behaviour. I concede that if in fact you intend the consequences I predict above then there is no point in my having written them down. Otherwise, I disagree that this is something I ought not do.
As to your complaints about who I choose to try to reason with: I don’t expect to be able to reason with trolls, and don’t expect the community to need me to*. Moreover I do not care to reason with them: I care to have them leave. Long and careful arguments are not what seems best to accomplish that goal. You, however, are a largely reasonable person I largely respect, and one who I would not like to drive out of the community, so when I see you doing something I think is a mistake, it might seem worth my time to engage with you and try to convince you not to. I am much more interested in engaging with my friends than my enemies, even if my friends are already better people than my enemies.
In any case, this is not a contest of who is a better person. Perhaps my priorities are indeed misaligned. This does not mean my assessment of the likely consequences of your actions is wrong.
*though as it happens I spent much of my next several comments on the original post saying things to that one troll like “I would hope the community would shun you” and “I still would not want you, personally, in any community I’m part of, because your behavior is bad.” I deny that it is necessary that I have done this as a precondition for being worth listening to, but in fact I did. In the interests of keeping my handles separate I will not comment on whether or how I responded to anything on tumblr or elsewhere.
The majority of my post consisted of specific empirical predictions which were not about the contents of your head. Whether I am mistaken about why you are doing what you’re doing changes nothing about what the effects of your behaviour are likely to be. To the extent it was about the contents of your head it was addressing a conflict I perceived between the likely outcomes of your behavior and the goals you have elsewhere explicitly given for that behaviour. I concede that if in fact you intend the consequences I predict above then there is no point in my having written them down. Otherwise, I disagree that this is something I ought not do.
As to your complaints about who I choose to try to reason with: I don’t expect to be able to reason with trolls, and don’t expect the community to need me to*. Moreover I do not care to reason with them: I care to have them leave. Long and careful arguments are not what seems best to accomplish that goal. You, however, are a largely reasonable person I largely respect, and one who I would not like to drive out of the community, so when I see you doing something I think is a mistake, it might seem worth my time to engage with you and try to convince you not to. I am much more interested in engaging with my friends than my enemies, even if my friends are already better people than my enemies.
In any case, this is not a contest of who is a better person. Perhaps my priorities are indeed misaligned. This does not mean my assessment of the likely consequences of your actions is wrong.
*though as it happens I spent much of my next several comments on the original post saying things to that one troll like “I would hope the community would shun you” and “I still would not want you, personally, in any community I’m part of, because your behavior is bad.” I deny that it is necessary that I have done this as a precondition for being worth listening to, but in fact I did. In the interests of keeping my handles separate I will not comment on whether or how I responded to anything on tumblr or elsewhere.