Could one have written a comment that achieves the same things but has better vibes? In my opinion, [absolutely]! I could easily write such a comment! (If that’s a crux, I’m happy to do it.)
I don’t think you can. The reason why the comment in question has aggressive vibes is because it’s clearly stating things that Worley predictably won’t want to hear. The way you write something that includes the same denotative claims with softer vibes is by means of obfuscation: adding a lot of puffy hedging veribage that makes it easier for a distracted or conflict-averse reader to skim over the comment’s literal words without noticing what a rebuke is intended. The obfuscated version only achieves the same things in the minds of sufficiently savvy readers who can reverse the vibe-softening distortion and infer the original intent.
Thanks, that was better than most language-softening attempts I see, but …
Similar information, but not “exactly” the same information. Deleting the “very harmful false things” parenthetical omits the claim that the falsehoods promulgated by organized religion are very harmful. (That’s significant because someone focused on harm rather than epistemics might be okay with picking up harmless false beliefs, but not very harmful false beliefs.) Changing “very quickly you descend” to “you can descend” alters the speed and certainty with which religious converts are claimed to descend into nebulous and vague anti-epistemology. (That’s significant, because a potential convert being warned that they could descend into anti-epistemology might think, “Well, I’ll be extra careful not to do that, then,” whereas a warning that one very quickly will descend is less casually brushed off.)
That’s what I meant by “obfuscation” in the grandparent: the softer vibes of no-assertion-of-harmfulness versus “very harmful false things”, and of “can descend” versus “very quickly descend”, stem from the altered meanings, not just from adjusting the vibes while keeping the meanings constant.
It’s not that I don’t know the difference; it’s that I think the difference is semantically significant. If I more often use softer vibes in my comments than Said, I think that’s probably because I’m a less judgemental person than him, as an enduring personality trait. That is, we write differently because we think differently. I don’t think website moderators should require commenters to convincingly pretend to have different personalities than they actually have. That seems like it could be really bad.