Based on all your other comments, you've obviously done a thorough reading / analysis of my article, so thank you for that. But there still seems to be a pretty large gap between what I was trying to say, versus what you understood me to say.

For instance, you've cast me as trying to espouse an "objective" viewpoint - but in fact my entire argument hinges on prioritizing subjective experience. That's the whole point of my differentiating between "meaningful" and "rhetorical" perspectives, and insisting that we focus on the former.

And to be clear, I didn't set out to excuse kitten killing here. I've never considered myself a nihilist, or wanted to accept nihilism as the default worldview - and so this is, in a way, the best defense I was able to come up with against true nihilism. It just turns out that I couldn't find such a strong defense as most of us empathetic humans would hope for.

The sad truth is that we cannot always rely on empathy to guide people's actions (which is demonstrated by you calling me a fuck face in various places). And it's for that reason that I argue that we need to implement legal and governmental systems whose game-theoretical dynamics essentially coerce people to behave in pro-social ways.

Medium, after all, does have some such mechanisms: for instance, I could block you or try to report you for harassment. Medium probably wouldn't really crack down on you calling me a fuck face, but I do think the ideal platform would, in fact, have a policy strictly against various logical fallacies, including ad hominem arguments - not just because they make the experience worse for almost everyone, but because they don't prove anything.

P.S. One thing you should know about me is that my sole goal of writing on here is to try to make humans get along better, by offering what I believe to be common sense opinions of things. In other words, I’m sympathetic to collective humanism, like you’ve claimed to be. It could be that I make no sense sometimes, but I really am not worth getting angry at or insulting - I'm just doing my best here.

Also, I am a slow writer and responder, so I probably won't be able to find the time to respond to most of your comments, so what I've said here will have to suffice for the most part.

That said, I've written several other articles that probably come off as a little less amoral. Perhaps you'd like one of them better:

https://medium.com/@nebulasaurus/will-humans-ever-settle-on-one-religion-4e50c81b1d96

https://nebulasaurus.medium.com/there-are-no-fair-fights-c4ade3e4a4d8

https://nebulasaurus.medium.com/4-things-all-good-citizens-believe-implicitly-dd37c4dbef6