[zanny]

Same thing with this line:

> TTIP was negotiated in secrecy (as all trade agreements are)

That seems like a really steep assumption to try to start a conversation about changing perspectives with time. He opens with a purported tautology about how you must do trade deals, which I feel hurts the argument against moving goalposts - because that seems like the exact kind of sentiment that leads to the behavior in the first place. This has always happened, thus it must always continue to happen is rarely a way to start productive dialog about something.

[Unman]

That's another good example. The original post is actually nearly an example of "How to start a flamewar."

You can even see the discussion of CETA spawning a long, subsidiary thread which distracts from the central thesis which we should be arguing about. (I am not offering an opinion on the content of that discussion.)

[zanny]

The real takeaway should be that if you want to make a point about the topic of discussion you really cannot use real world examples. Nothing is black and white, everything is nuanced, and online someone will argue anything (including the connotations associated with the word "is" in this very thread).

It should be no surprise that if you make a post trying to talk about the meta of controversial topics, that if you start directly citing said topics the discussion ends up being a debate about the controversy rather than the original intent.

[the_mitsuhiko]

Any example about a topic with a lot of emotions is going to do that. Be it static Be static typing, free trade vs protectionism. Etc.