>> What do you mean ‘people like you’? What group membership are you claiming? Given that I also agreed that such policies exist, are you saying I am someone like you?

> I and the author and several other people who have talked to you on this page.

Ok, so you are a member of a group of individuals. Do you know each other outside of HN? What defines membership?

> At a point where a conversation devolves this far I'm not sure how to respond to it. I am not sure what you are objecting to on a broad scale other than how very specific phrasing in these comments came across to you

Earlier you seemed to understand that I was objecting to the idea that it was ok to misrepresent peoples intentions.

Claiming that you don’t understand this now seem questionable.

-- and I'm not going to waste time proving to you what I was trying to say; either you believe me when I try to clarify what my intentions are and try to clarify what the author meant, or you don't believe me. I'm not going to enter a discussion where we recursively debate what subject we're debating. I'm willing to argue about a lot of things, but I'm not willing to get that meta.
I'm also definitely not willing to have an argument about how communities should philosophically respond to harm based on whether or not the people hurting them meant to.

Ok, so you are an absolutist on this point. That is consistent with your past statements. It is exactly what I thought, and I think you are wrong.

It’s ok for you not to want to have a discussion about it, but my belief is that if you misconstrue people’s intentions and then act on that, you will cause more harm to them and the communities you claim to support.

> If you think the author is lying about their intentions writing this piece, then just say that and move on.

Weird. Where did I imply thst?

> If you think the author is lying and they haven't ever experienced discrimination or oppressive systems, then fine, just say that and move on.

Weird. Where did I imply that?

> But if anyone wants to do a deep dive where we annotate every sentence of their comments, then they're just going to have to do that annotation on their own, I'm not really interested.

I only did that with you because almost none of your comments mapped to anything I had actually said.

> I don't completely understand how it's possible for someone to be so offended about the danger of reading too much into people's intentions

I’m not offended by it. I think it’s harmful. What I am inquiring into is why you so vigorously seem to defend it.

> while they simultaneously break apart someone else's comment line-by-line and say that they are "metaphorically" speaking for an entire community and that we should judge that as if they are intending to be that community's representative.

I didn’t say we should judge them. I said that is what they were doing. You put ‘metaphorically’ in quotes, but I think that you do understand that they were speaking metaphorically. I was responding to your denial with a clarification.

> Do you really not see the irony in this?

There is no irony in it.

> We can also agree that misrepresenting or distorting other people’s intentions is wrong

> On this one point it seems that most of us on this thread have signaled we are in agreement, including the author,

That’s simply false. The author’s metaphor of having his face stepped on was intended to defend the idea that it doesn’t matter what people’s intentions are under those circumstances. You have yourself also defended this position even in the very comment I have replied to, and in several before.

You could have just agreed to this way back in the thread, and this discussion would have stopped there, but given that both of you have argued to the contrary, there is no clarity that you actually agree.

The only reason it has continued is that both you and the author have been arguing that it is ok for the oppressed not to have an accurate understanding of the motivations of people who are hurting them.

If you are saying you have changed your mind as a result of our dialog, then I commend you.