Yup

Keep at it!

You’ve got nothing, sorry.

You’ve failed at addressing my argument directly, failed at building a straw man, so I guess it makes sense you’d be trying ad hominem.

There are plenty of fake accounts in existence.

You don’t know either way, which makes your attribution entirely fallacious.

You really can’t address the argument I made, can you?

Your comment was so reductive as to be indistinguishable from bad faith equivalency. The claim that you didn’t mean to speaks only to your naivety.

You can’t just ignore parts of the argument to which you have no answer.

You don’t know who that person is or whether they even exist. It is beyond spurious to assign their statements to any other entity.

I pointed out that your argument was so reductive as to amount to both-siding. I’m glad it wasn’t your intent, but it’s a shame that you don’t see the problem with that regardless.

If you mean @barry_aptt then I’m happy to report that I did check their profile before making my original comment.

This is exactly what I’m talking about. You have no idea who that person is, what correlation their posting has to their political position, or in fact whether they exist at all. And you’re drawing equivalence between that post and a recorded statement by the president.

If you think a bit harder about your reference you might remember that Barthes’ essay argues against relying on the intent of the original author. This isn’t the coup de grace you think it is.

And again, this has nothing to do with you. I’m not claiming any specific intent behind your statements. I am pointing out the demonstrable fact that your argument not only can be misinterpreted, but that it is more likely to be interpreted as drawing equivalence, given how that same position has been commonly used.

In that case you are naively both-siding this issue.

To help clarify: if somebody was to read your first comment, are they likely to infer that the two sides are equivalent?

What do you think “both siding” entails?

It is the simple reduction of two completely disproportionate responses to the phrase “both sides do it”.

The same logic keeps being applied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both sides are fighting, they say, so both sides share equal responsibility for the destruction and for making peace.

I believe you when you say it isn’t your intent to do so, but in that case you are doing so obliviously. You don’t even know who the commenter is, so it’s pure assumption on your part that they’re even left wing to begin with.

You know, both sides doing something doesn’t mean or even imply that it’s to equal degree. It’s just that both sides in the US seem to be doing it right now.

On this point, you are completely wrong. When you have one party making election denialism a core of their belief system while on the other side you have a few random people making claims on social media, it is absurd to claim that “both sides … seem to be doing it right now”. The very fact of you attempting to make the argument implies that there is equivalence between the two sides.

No, both sides have not made denialism central to their party platform. No, the Democrats did not have any cabinet nominees who refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the last election. No, both sides did not storm the Capitol building in an attempt to prevent the certification of the election.

No, both sides are not doing it.

I’m sorry, but this is the most egregious example of “both sides do it” that I’ve ever seen.

The republicans made denying the election a central pillar of their platform, and the lies was repeated by virtually every leader in the party. And a violent mob stormed the capitol in an attempt to overturn the vote.

Show me a fragment of that being done by the left.

When was he last time you read anything that didn’t come from social media?