I think the “Reply” button/link works pretty well (leading to both a post at the bottom of the thread and also a little “Reply” with an expand/collapse attached to the post replied to).
There’s certainly many things to flat-out reject, I’m too much in favor to hold strong convictions and maintaining them if defensible, so it’s far from “open-mindedness” to insist that no universal truths can be discovered. At the same time, you expanded on the argument yourself that the subject matter is usually more complex/difficult/messy/“nuanced” (?) than a broad, generalized term implies, and while you can demand/expect that there should/could easily be some universal agreement about them, on the ground, it can sometimes be not that clear-cut, precisely for the reason of fair judgment and avoiding harm.
To not go at length into some of the broad topics you mentioned (which are of many different aspects with many different motivations/views involved), I would wonder for example, what you mean by “anti-maskers”, to even get to an understanding myself what exactly you’re flat-out rejecting. Wouldn’t it be OK to not wear a mask while sleeping in bed, in the shower, maybe while at home in quarantine with your family in the household, would it be fine to not wear a mask outside, what about those who already had Covid-19 (depending on whether or not medically they would later continue to spread it)? Or people who refuse any at all, fine, you may “reject” their behavior, but what does this mean? To what extend could that be identified and mask-wearing enforced? Wouldn’t it also somewhat depend on their contact patterns? Given that the masks, I think you would medically, scientifically, agree, only play a secondary role in limiting the spread of the pandemic anyway, given that people always take risks and trade-offs with their health and the harm they’re willing to potentially inflict on others, and these are de-facto mostly their own, personal choices, with very limited control over what they’re doing in and with their private, personal lifes. In a similar way, would like to hear your position on smoking or traveling by car or eating meat or sugar, would you jump to flat-out reject these (certainly without doubt, some would)?
So no need for hurt feelings, none of this is supposed to question any strong position or conviction, it’s an effort for actually understand better and in detail what you mean. Same with Haupt: to me, in the first, quick read, it appears as if the criticism of political and economic exploitation is far more dominant, and from that he’s probably trying to interpret the other events, which likely is indeed flawed, but doesn’t therefore render the original main complaint invalid, so why even bother to go into the confused secondary questions about all the things that went and go wrong with the response to Covid-19 while the invitation in the newsletter sounds to be more about the former? And I really in fact hope that people for both topics did and do make good sense on their own, instead of getting excited by that kind of pseudo-“sensemaking” or false “open-mindedness”.
).