Crap, the author found my post about her article.

No no no no no! You’re doing the thing again! The thing where you link a piece of evidence and then say it means the exact opposite of what it says.

I specifically explain in my post that I am not a fan of Eron Gjoni. Prior to writing my post, I didn’t see him as much more than a scraggly programmer who was arguably a victim of abuse. Your post actually convinced me otherwise.

Like… when you present evidence, you need to draw a connection between the evidence and your conclusion - and the connection cannot be “the evidence is lying”. If the evidence is lying, you don’t get free reign to make whatever conclusion you please; it is your responsibility to find a piece of evidence that actually does support your conclusion.

Like look at this:

These are places where evidence would be good. Like, what was incorrect about the assertion that Gjoni was teaching people about feminism? Why was it not racist to put “human” in quotes? Or on the topic of debunking, what was inaccurate about stuff like the math I did regarding when the 4chan thread was created, and what the heck does “I know how this works because I own a blog myself” mean?

You don’t achieve anything by just pointing and laughing at these quotes - anyone reading my post can already do that. You literally didn’t debunk anything, you just posted my essay verbatim to an even smaller audience than I did!

I can’t stress this enough: your goal is to make connections between your evidence and your conclusions. Every piece of evidence you present in your article, if taken at face value, refutes your thesis. And you provide no actual evidence to suggest the rest of the evidence should not be taken at face value!

LIKE LOOK AT THIS. Immediately aftercriticizing my essay - which opened by pointing out that “I want you to get therapy” wasn’t necessarily a threat as you construed it to be, you retweet a post that SAYS THE EXACT SAME THING EXPLICITLY WITHOUT IT BEING A THREAT. I’m not even trying to write a smear article about you that paints you as a liar, but if I was, this is the sort of thing I would pair with the previous post to imply you were intentionally misrepresenting your evidence! This is the sort of thing you should have done to attack Gjoni!

Like, I am not attacking you for being wrong. I am not even actively trying to refute your claim. I am begging you to make a good argument for your position.

Look at this:

You’re doing the thing again! I don't say his sexual harassment is no big deal. In fact, I specifically say that I don’t have the moral right to decide what is and isn’t a big deal. Here is the wolf picture. Rather, I point out that what you are presenting as sexual harassment horrible enough to defend your point that Eron Gjoni is a bad person is a joke that a board of experts determined to be appropriate for children under six years of age. This is not a personal opinion I am presenting. This is an observable fact.

Like, I want to agree with you. But if I hold your position, I need to be able to defend myself. When people ask me what sort of sexual harassment Gjoni committed that makes me consider him a bad person, I can’t point to a joke they made on My Little Pony. My peeps would lambast me for not only using vague terminology to make someone’s actions sound worse than they actually are, but for taking the word away from victims of more violent or disgusting sexual harassment. I can't side with you unless you give me something better to defend myself with.

And then to make things worse, you go right on to say that he doesn’t just do it to women - he makes his stupid little My Little Pony joke to everyone. Your statement that he “sexually harasses women” is the exact type of lie I describe earlier in my post - “a half-truth, presented as being the whole truth, is a complete lie”. He harassed you, you discovered he harasses everyone, and you chose to present it as “he harasses women”. I think Anita Sarkeesian would call that a “damsels in distress narrative”.

Maybe you would have a decent argument here if he kept on pushing the “enemy is actually infatuated with me” angle long after he was told to stop. But the one piece of evidence you present of this harassment ends as soon as she tells him to stop. Do you not even realize how much more powerful that piece of evidence would have been if you had just cropped out the last message? It would’ve looked like a snippet from an ongoing thing, and instead you made it look like he realized his mistake and pulled back.

Like oh my god, here I am telling you how to attack what seems to be an innocent person. This isn’t even about Eron Gjoni anymore, this is about you, and your ability to present evidence that does not immediately undermine the point you are trying to make. I understand that you felt hurt by him. And as a normal person, your hurt is regrettable and should stand on its own.

But, you are not a normal person. You, my friend, are an essayist. You are a queen among men, a ruler from the shadows, a rebel leader who smuggles weapons to her wary compatriots. Though your rhetoric and arguments, you are the one who controls the minds of people. You are the one who equips your soldiers with powerful arguments, who infects your opponents with traitorous ideas. At your best, you will enter a battlefield and leave with twice as many allies. That is who you are - what you can be. You are the voice that reaches out to diverse and disagreeable people and brings them together under a common banner, convincing every one of them that despite their differences, the thing you care about matters, and is is worth fighting for. You are more than a voice for yourself, but a force that will ideally reach out and drive as many people as possible.

I would like to fight for you - I think a lot of people would. But you have to equip us. You have to provide a way for us to confront opposition and bring them around to our side, not leave us defenseless and force us to run away or cover our ears when opposed. You need to present yourself as a stable paragon - someone who can understand and not just avoid, but actively weaken her opponents. Your allies need to see that the position they share is not weak, and that it can withstand direct scrutiny and come out the better for it. As an essayist, you need to fight to win the middle, not merely laugh about a foregone conclusion with the people who already agree with you.

I am giving you homework. I want you to write a decent smear piece about Eron Gjoni. I want you to make him look as bad as possible, using evidence that actually supports the claims you are making. If you are trying to make a claim and you do not have evidence that supports it, I want you to leave the claim out. Rhetoric isn’t a scattergun where only some of the pellets have to hit: every unsubstantiated claim you make actually reduces the overall credibility of your piece. I want to see you hit all targets head-on. I want to see your gold material.

Do that, and maybe you’ll have an audience with the middle. Right now, you are simply not giving me enough to support your views.