El Chisme

I want to preface that I mean this very sincerely and not as a potshot: If you really want productive conversations and hate when someone is a "debate lord," you might find yourself better-served by focusing less on tactics for arguing and more on tactics for communicating. Part of the reason I say this beyond your own admission is that you're being really all-over-the-place here, and seem to be presenting multiple contradictory stances based on what you're responding to (e.g. Is Contra justified? Is this about Contra at all? etc.) Two of the reasons that I wrote at length were because I tend to want to address things exhaustively and I accepted leaving myself more open to a potshot (which you took immediately) just to make what I was saying as clear as I could manage. When you called this a "gish-gallop" I sort of gave up on that approach as an axiom, but that combined with being tired means I might fail to communicate myself, so be prepared I guess:

I think that what you're talking about now is a) almost nothing to do with the original post, b) not true, based on seeming to not really understand "the crowd," and c) very counterproductive. All of these can be summarized together: It is good to criticize public figures for saying abhorrent things that damage society, and most people do it not because it's fun (though they certainly try to make it more fun for themselves a lot of the time, e.g. with colorful language like you also use) but because there's a serious problem, like deflecting from the severity of an ongoing genocide, that they find to be intolerable. There can be no justice where Clintonites speak unchallenged, and there is no equity between the silenced cries of tens of thousands of dead children and the bloviating of this liberal dweeb who will cry "cancel culture" for receiving pushback even in a situation as stark as this one. I don't think wringing our hands about some impurity of spirit possessing "the crowd" is beneficial to "the movement," especially in the context of spinning a victim narrative about someone like Contra.

But there is no movement, there are just a bunch of people in various spaces who mostly don't know what to do and, by merit of having problems they can't hide from in a mansion, feel threatened and acutely perceive a need to defend themselves from. Helping these people to organize is good. Giving them concrete feedback and ideological engagement is good. Hemming and hawing about the content of their hearts is not. I think you know that this personal discomfort has nothing to do with Gaza and that giving the slightest trace of a safe quarter to imperial apologia is much worse than whatever smug satisfaction you imagine is felt by what you experience as a nasty mob as it silences the smol bean influencers by . . . just speaking over them. I think letting such people stand unchallenged is the much scarier option, and anyone who professes to care about human benefit would do well to come up with a framework for producing a materialist analysis of how to pursue such a thing rather than concerning themselves with if the vibes are off.

If it makes you feel better, a cool thing about not being a public figure is that you typically don't have an audience and therefore don't get this kind of pushback, and it's much easier to just engage with people as people. Remember that thing that you made fun of me for, of just writing a few extra sentences to make my angle more legible to a likely third party? That's toward the high end of the level of propriety that you will ever need, and even that is uncommon.