Someone else doing something I think is ineffective doesn’t imply that it’s effective to do it! And yes, the fact that one side of a debate does the ineffective thing makes it more likely the other side will as well, but that’s not any sort of vindication! To quote myself:
Manheim’s Law of Positive-Sum Badness:
In polarized disputes, evidence that one side is stupid, malicious, or evil increases the probability that the opposing side is too.
Someone else doing something I think is ineffective doesn’t imply that it’s effective to do it! And yes, the fact that one side of a debate does the ineffective thing makes it more likely the other side will as well, but that’s not any sort of vindication! To quote myself:
Fair, it depends a lot on whether you think the badness of insulting someone is due to intrinsic vs game-theoretic reasons.