After looking at a bunch of posts, I’m still having trouble understanding the criteria as to what’s insulting or not.
I was called out by a Mod for describing a post as having “nerdy and sneering” tone (which I thought was accurate), and then for describing the Mod’s tactic of what I perceived as making dogmatic assertions while implying bad faith on the part of others and not engaging in opposing points of view as “creepy.”
I can see certainly see how these could be perceived as insulting, but they were offered in the context of more blantantly insulting posts. In the same thread, people were calling each others’ posts “moronic.” And in a thread entitled “I pit the derisive, condenscending, anti-conspiriacy propagandists” the same Mod directly called someone “delusional”, and replied to their comment “this is stupid.”
Is there really a principled way to distinguish between calling someone delusional (sounds pretty gratuitous and insulting to me) or their ideas “moronic” and calling the tone of something "sneering’ or “creepy” (which is actually more just plain descriptive)?
Is there a “higher power” who can clarify this?