People who use "New comments" are going to see new comments posted, whatever old the threads are. I use that filter, and I regularly comment on weeks old threads to reply to someone.

Reply to them on the same topic you've been talking with them about in some other thread, which they told you they weren't interested in discussing further, angry that they're not giving you responses you think you deserve back in the original thread? If so, I think you should stop doing that, however it is that you're finding their messages in other threads.

If you accuse an instance of power tripping, be ready to answer when they reply, otherwise it just seems to be arguing in bad faith.

I mean maybe that's fair. The whole message was so hostile and dishonest that I couldn't really see any point to giving a reply though. Also, like I said at the time, PugJesus already gave a pretty detailed reply that more or less mirrored what I would want to say about it (which Unruffled of course did not respond to.) Also, I'd already covered my POV on it to death in other comments by that point.

Excerpts of the message I didn't reply to:

he’s an angry turbolib who blames the left (and Eugene in particular, for some reason) for the pathetic failure of the corporate-c**k-sucking Democrats to defeat Donald Trump. There is plenty of evidence for all of those things.

PJ has a bad temper, and that he’s been losing his shit more and more lately. He even states as such in his profile. While I do feel empathy for the fact he lives in chronic pain

I mean, what’s the difference between your position here and something like, “Harvey Weinstein has made lots of great movies and nobody else has complained about him, so that woman must be lying”? There is no difference.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with that stuff lol

When db0 came in here and talked about the exact same issue, but in a non-frothing manner, I had a normal conversation with them. I don't agree with the points they raised, and they presumably think I'm wrong as hell, but it's fine, we can just talk. Because they didn't accuse me of protecting any sexual predators or call anyone cock suckers, we got to hash it out, which is how it's supposed to work. I did the same with Ada over in that thread; I don't agree with her but I told her directly what the issue I was trying to communicate was, and we got to talk about it, there's no particular bad blood (at least not from my side), it's just a conversation.

I don't feel though like I need to engage in every conversation no matter what kind of unhinged nonsense is coming at me from the other side, or how low the probability of it ever going anywhere, whatever little badge is attached to the person's username.