In another hypothetical where he were accused of sex crimes but everyone was fine with his epistemic tactics, we probably wouldn’tve banned either
It seems that the issues with ialdabaoth’s argumentation only appear in comments made after the allegations related to other behaviors of his. Therefore the argument that he is being banned for his epistemic tactics rather than his misconduct is just removing the issue up one step:
Ialdabaoth is being banned for his poor epistemic tactics, not his conduct.
But his epistemic tactics are manipulative because of his conduct.
So the hypothetical where he was accused of sex crimes[1] and people didn’t mind his epistemic tactics isn’t a hypothetical. It was actuality. What we’ve observed is that after the accusations, certain people went from being fine with his epistemic tactics to not fine with them.
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Which I don’t believe is actually true. I have read the relevant literature and no post makes an accusation that a crime has been committed, only manipulative sexual behavior. I will hedge this statement by acknowledging that I do not know the full situation.
What behavior of Edgar’s is it that draws your ire? You acknowledge that Edgar’s position is poor, he believes he has no good options, yet you feel it necessary to blame him for choosing a bad option.
Plenty of rational thought in a social sphere comes from analyzing striking personal events using our repositories of stored information. Plenty of valuable rational thought stems from self-justification. Do you want Edgar to self-reflect on his behaviors and devise a scheme in which he is a bad person? Edgar’s not going to view himself as a moral mutant no matter how evil you think he is.
We rarely get the opportunity to delve into the thought patterns of evil people. We will likely never know what the 9/11 hijackers were thinking because they are all dead. We rarely hear rational justifications from murderers and rapists (we just hear their lawyer’s best arguments) because the large majority of murderers and rapists don’t care to express themselves rationally.
This means that if Edgar is evil (as you seem to believe) then his insights are more valuable than the insights of a non-evil person. Rational, evil people are in short supply and even moreso are rational, evil people willing to expound on their evil nature.
If Edgar provides faulty reasoning, refute it! Or if you want to, disregard it and allow others to do so. The absolute worst thing to do is to blind yourself to rational discussion from evil people and to force others to do the same. That will just make it so that when a potential victim hears faulty, evil reasoning straight from the source it will be their first time and they might be convinced!