(also, on a purely selfish note, the contemporary political shitstorm has taken over every other venue I communicate in and I really would rather not see it here)

This is definitely something I can understand.

Thanks, I hadn't noticed that there was a wiki.

But of course I have done nothing of the sort.

Is there a glossary of your jargon somewhere?

Engaging in hyperbole instead of rational discussion is a choice.

I don't think the kind of rhetorical hyperbole I'm using in my post, that any normal person can recognize as such, is incompatible with rational discussion. Other than that, what you say is fair enough.

(On another topic, you're using the verb "steelman", which I think you already used before. I had never encountered this word before. I'm guessing that it's local jargon for the opposite of "to strawman", meaning something like "making the position you attack as strong as possible"?)

I find it funny, by the way, that people here are criticizing me for not giving evidence for a claim that is not only known to be true by almost everyone, but which can be verified in 5 seconds with Google if you have a doubt, while recommending a piece that begins with a very strong and arguably unverifiable claim about the evolutionary origin of the way in which humans talk about politics... (Which is not to say, to be clear, that I disagree with everything Yudkowsky says in that essay.)

Yes, I read it, there was a link in one of the first replies I got.

But look, I think we're both wasting our time here, since I've already decided to tone down my language and not to post anything here that is directly related to politics. So I'll just leave it at that, because I really have work to do :-p

The issue isn't what you see, the issue is what intelligent people from outside of your echo chamber see.

Okay, let me rephrase what I originally said: it's not incompatible. Do you think it's incompatible? Based on what you say later in your comment, I guess you do. So let me ask you a more general question: do you think there are no claims one can make, such that if someone denies them, one can reasonably conclude that the person denying it is not seriously engaging with one? I'm sure you don't (obvious counterexamples are not hard to come up with), so there must something about the particular claim I made, which makes you think it doesn't fall under that category.

Indeed, in the second part of that comment, you say that for someone like you this claim wasn't obvious. I believe you when you say that you had no idea about this, but I also think that, for any random person, it's highly unlikely they are in your epistemic situation with respect to this claim. And I don't think I have to provide evidence for claims that, in all likelihood, an overwhelming proportion of my readers already know to be true.

Even if you disagree with that, it wouldn't change the fact that, if you had a doubt, it would have taken you 5 seconds to assuage it by looking this up on Google. I just searched "trump hate crimes election" and got plenty of evidence that a lot of people were saying that after the election. Now, if what you mean is that, given my tone and the fact that you don't know me, it was reasonable of you not to make any effort to ascertain the plausibility of that claim, then I'm happy to concede that. But I took you, perhaps mistakenly, to be making a stronger claim.

I don't see how that's incompatible. If I say that Trump often speaks unintelligibly and someone denies it or even claims not to be sure that it's true, provided that person is intelligent and has a decent mastery of the English language, I would not believe they are saying that in good faith. Similarly, when I say that immediately after the election a lot of people were asserting that Trump's victory had caused a substantial increase in the number of hate crimes and someone denies it or claims not to be sure it's true, I think it's perfectly reasonable of me to conclude that they are not seriously engaging with me.

Of course, people here didn't deny it, they just asked me to provide evidence for that claim. But I don't see the point of asking for evidence for a claim that you agree with unless you have some serious reason to think that you might be wrong in believing it's true. (In this case, if someone had any doubt, Google would solve that problem in 5 seconds.) To my mind, this isn't really being rational, it's pedantry that can only serve to avoid dealing with the part of the argument that is actually contentious, which in this case was my argument that the evidence doesn't support the claim that Trump's victory had caused a substantial increase of the number of hate crimes.