To be clear, I agree that the comment in question is expressing judgement and derision! I can see how you might think I was playing dumb by commenting on the denotation of stupid without clarifying that, but hopefully the fact that I am willing to clarify that after it’s been pointed out counts for something?
But I don’t think you clarified. You offered the distinction between two separate value-neutral definition of stupidity, which I think we both knew were not what the topic at hand was about.
If you had said “I think we need to disambiguate between the object-level effects of people shielding themselves from criticism, which might in effect make them stupider, and the underlying judgement of people as ‘unworthy of engagement with’ and associated derision”, then I would not have objected at all. Indeed, I think that distinction seems helpful!
But coming into a discussion where the topic at hand is clearly the judgement and derision dimension, and proposing a distinction orthogonal to that, reads to me as an attempt at making the pointing at the judgement and derision dimension harder. Which is a very common tactic, indeed it is the central tactic associated with passive aggression.
To be clear, I agree that the comment in question is expressing judgement and derision! I can see how you might think I was playing dumb by commenting on the denotation of stupid without clarifying that, but hopefully the fact that I am willing to clarify that after it’s been pointed out counts for something?
But I don’t think you clarified. You offered the distinction between two separate value-neutral definition of stupidity, which I think we both knew were not what the topic at hand was about.
If you had said “I think we need to disambiguate between the object-level effects of people shielding themselves from criticism, which might in effect make them stupider, and the underlying judgement of people as ‘unworthy of engagement with’ and associated derision”, then I would not have objected at all. Indeed, I think that distinction seems helpful!
But coming into a discussion where the topic at hand is clearly the judgement and derision dimension, and proposing a distinction orthogonal to that, reads to me as an attempt at making the pointing at the judgement and derision dimension harder. Which is a very common tactic, indeed it is the central tactic associated with passive aggression.