I've actually taken a step back from the hard core individual fringe arguments in the last few weeks and I've been trying to look at the whole ongoing fringe movement, trying to notice underlying trends and shared traits.
One of the broad philosophical underpinnings I've started to recognize is this vague, broad, unspoken and undefined anti-intellectual idea that society in general and the skeptics/rationalists/atheist/whatever groups specifically put too much value in being factually correct. With a lot of Woo Slingers and even more often with Woo Apologist this is sort of the impression I get after talking to them a while, that they see us sacrificing some other value or quality in order to "be right" and we need to learn that "being right" isn't all that matters. It often comes from people who have a very narrow personal view of what they consider science and who, in their worldview, have some equally valid method for determining a worldview.
This is where, I think, a lot (but not all) of the tone policing, a lot of the "Oh you just want to 'win' the argument" style counter arguments, and it certainly at least shares a border if not some territory with the "Science and logic are cold and sterile and take all the color and joy out of life" crowd.
This is where we often get those weird performance art skits that act like they are trying to pass a moral onto instead of making anything resembling a valid or even coherent argument. This is one of many reasons that these arguments just so aggressively go nowhere. They aren't trying to win, they are trying to make us give up because to them that proves that being "right" isn't that important.
This motivation is one of the hardest ones to argue against because A) it's full of doublespeak because no can with a straight face actually directly argue against factual correctness as a quality and B) is often really hard to tell how far down the rabbit hole they are.
I honestly do think there is a statistically significant portion of the population that, whether they admit it to others or themselves, sorta don't value factual correctness. Maybe it's an after the fact rationalization for non-factual belief they hold and can't bring themselves to get rid of, maybe it's an actual base personality component they do indeed have, maybe a little of both but I do think it is there and does affect intellectual discourse.
I think this is a factor, one of many, in some not all of the Woo topics in which the Woo proponent becomes over-obsessed with arguments being "nice."
This thread, while an extreme example of it, is hardly the first time we've dealt with someone who falls back on trying to police the behavior of the thread as a way to distract, themselves as much as anyone IMO, from being unable to intellectually defend a position.
