Comment by KaeseEs

Another negative trend that's clearly happened in this thread is drive-by voting: all of your interlocutor's posts have negative points, whereas the only posts in the thread that deserved any downvotes were the initial post (the only legitimate instance of the poorly-named 'middlebrow dismissal' that I can see) and the one where you put words in his mouth at the end ("Oh, so they're liars now?"). Postulate: very few people read anything but the first post and its reply, and upon doing so most upvoted all of your posts in the thread and downvoted all of your interlocutor's. Intelligent discussion indeed.