> Of course concealing one’s true intent just enough to be able to later play dumb and deny motivations when called out is a decent strategy for online arguments, but it’s not foolproof.

I don't see how I "played dumb". I obviously know how to parse a sentence, and in the original comment that you're deliberately misreading, I said "raw facts don't care about your feelings", and then I explain that most discussions aren't really about raw facts but rather how they're interpreted.

> Deciphering the commenter’s true meaning wasn’t super hard in this case. From claiming that a highly intelligent conservative pundit is a moron it’s easy to deduce that the person thinks less intelligent conservatives are also morons.

How exactly is Ben Shapiro "highly intelligent"? Because he went to an Ivy League school? I can promise you that there's almost certainly a politician that you think is stupid that went to an Ivy League school, this isn't exactly a strong filter. Oh, is it because he talks really fast? I do that too, I guess I'm highly intelligent.

I don't think all conservatives are morons, and I don't think conservatives have a monopoly on being morons. I think the considerably-more-left-leaning The Young Turks, for example, are also pretty dumb. I have stated this multiple times now, and the fact that you're not responding to me directly is telling: I think pretending that you're somehow "above" your emotions is stupid. I think fetishizing the idea of divorcing "reason" from "emotion" is a dumb, even if I believed it were actually possible, which I'm not sure I do.

> They also explicitly said they “don’t like conservatives” which is a pretty silly statement to throw out there in general.

It's actually not silly to not like someone for their beliefs. That's dumb, of course if someone believes in something that I think is bad then I'm probably not going to like them very much. I don't really need to go into specifics for this, there's a lot of rhetoric that has caught on in conservative circles that I think is bad. You're obviously free to disagree with what statements are "bad" and that's fine; I'm sure there's rhetoric in more liberal circles that you think is bad.

People are entitled to free speech and to believe whatever they want, I wouldn't take that away from them even if I could, but they're not entitled to me liking them in spite of their beliefs. Life is much easier when you realize that you don't have to be everyone's friend.

> The idiom’s intended message is as simple as it seems. It says that getting emotional about facts doesn’t change them. It’s not some deeply profound thing to say.

I actually pointed this out in the original comment, and I'm arguing that that's not how the idiom is actually used. When I've seen it used (and admittedly I've obviously not seen every argument in which it is), it's always been used as some sort of "gotcha!" to act like an argument is less valid because the person making it is emotional.