> All I see is that I've been personally attacked and mischaracterized.

I think there is a fundamental gap in communication. Your actual point is not coming across at all, anywhere in this thread.

That's why you're getting downvoted.

"For Pony in particular, the syntax is not important ... it's simply not the point of the language."

You said that in direct response to someone who was wanting to see the syntax. While I do appreciate that it's not strictly speaking necessary in the context of your reply, it doesn't communicate at all why syntax isn't important to the pony language. You're just making a definitive statement unsupported by anything. Context or even a brief explanation would have been extremely helpful and almost certainly avoided all of this fuss. Your response, given without any context as to why syntax isn't important for pony, was actually harmful, rather than useful.

I really did not mean it as a personal attack, as unbelievable as that may be, apologies if it came across that way.

> I can't flag that outrageous personal attack and no one else has.

Why wouldn't you be able to flag it? And there's no flagged counter, it's not possible for ordinary users to tell how many times a post has been flagged; you cannot know that no one has flagged it, only that it is yet to reach the threshold.

> it's not the target's fault for perceiving it that way.

Where did I say or suggest that it was? If I thought that, what would I be apologizing for?

> If you're saying something negative about someone then that's a personal attack.

I disagree: if someone has negative traits or behavioral patterns that are externally observable, people should not be at fault for observing them and confronting the person about it.

In my view, and I believe in most everyone's view, personal attacks (personal insults) are attacks (expressions that incite) that use the other party's real, perceived, or claimed-perceived personal attributes as but a delivery vehicle for insult. They're the exact opposite of a genuine critique of someone's character or behavior in this sense, which is a thing I recognize as existing, valid, and distinct from this.

And so when I said I didn't mean those to be personal attacks, that's why I did so; it was me clarifying that I wasn't abusing personal critique to deliver an insult (nor do I think I actually delivered any), I legitimately just meant to offer a critique. Clearly it didn't land that way, and so for that I apologize. This is in contrast with "You seem to be struggling with the whole fallacy thing by the way", which I 100% meant as a personal insult, and was unsurprisingly moderated out for it. I did mean it, I do agree with it, but it was absolutely a vehicle for delivering an insult first, and everything else second.

It really does seem like we just disagree every step of the way.

Apologies. Been trying to work on it, it's not easy.