With the caveat that I very much believe in civil, good faith discourse, I find that in being a formal critique of the discourse, it can nevertheless introduce the author's own ideological preferences (fine) in a way that appears neutral (not fine) or purely formal (very not fine). Here are two examples:

> Calls for good faith communication are understood at best as naive requests to calm the outrage and conflict that now runs rife in political discourse. Both ends of the political spectrum (the far left and the far right) express this view. Both sides believe that “the other side” simply can’t be trusted and therefore cannot be engaged in good faith.

This phenomenon exists, it permeates the spectrum. However, the use of the word "far" here sticks in my craw. It implies, without outright suggesting, that the center is the reasonable referee, rather than existing on a spectrum that has a history. What is center today may very well have been "far left" or "far right" 40 years ago, and its relative distance from other ideologies is irrelevant when it comes to objectivity. You have a home base. It's not just "Liberalism". No one is a contentless unit of democratic formalism.

> Given well-documented advances in the field of information warfare, there should be no illusion: today’s culture war cannot be won by any side. Mutually assured destruction is now the name of the wargame.[6] The saturation of bad faith communication throughout culture is steadily increasing, like a kind of dangerous background radiation emitted from scientifically engineered memetic weaponry. Public political discourse is quickly becoming a toxic warzone, leaching externalities into families, friendships, and identity structures.

"Culture war" is a slur for a particular kind of vitriolic discourse, but it is in fact a war over what we consider the common good. In other words--politics. This is the meat and potatoes of democracy. Liberalism says the state shouldn't have an opinion on it. The "common good" is what we all agree it is. People will disagree. So then it stands to reason that whoever has the most influence (defined as broadly as you'd like) gets to decide what the common good is. This war has high stakes.

This also smuggles in the notion that so-called information warfare has in fact warped political outcomes, which is far from being well-documented. The cause->effect sequence is not established. But let's say it is--who are the actors, and why are they doing it? Those motivations have political causes. What are they? Or is misinformation just metastasized communication, chaotic irruptions that happens over a long enough time scale?

Overall, this presents a primarily formal and cultural diagnosis of political chaos and fracture as the root cause, couched in objective language, when that is itself an ideological position. There are other analyses. One might argue that the fractured discourse is an effect, not a cause, but it's taken for granted that _formal_ misbehavior is the cause of the fractious political atmosphere, rather than... well, anything else, I guess. Substitute your favorite diagnosis here.

It's fine to have this analysis. It's not fine to pretend it's anything but an ideological, non-objective analysis. I get the impulse to try to rise above the fray. Politics is ugly, but it's ugly because the stakes are so high. Getting lost in the weeds of formal objections isn't going to fix anything. There's more going on than just procedural fuck ups.

Just my take. I might be imbuing this article with the sins of similar pieces it doesn't commit (although I don't think so), but I think this tendency is common enough that it's worth bringing up. It happens fairly often on HN. Nerds love rules. I'm no exception.