Also, I wouldn't want anyone to refrain from criticizing me for fear of sounding like a strident jerk.

You can declare "Crocker's rules" and officially free other debaters from the burden of taking your fragile ego^H^H^Hfeeeeeeeelinggggs into account. [1] [2]

Tolerating 'official' trollishness (the option I proposed in my reply), while extremely effective, is a far more radical policy which should be reserved for blatant errors, obvious bad faith and the like. (It's much better than the default policy, which involves authoritarian warnings followed by adminstrative deletions and bans)

[1] That's the way it works in theory; in practice, declaring Crocker's Rules is all too often seen as a trollish and unpolite strategy. So your orignal post still has some merit.

[2] ETA: It should be noted that declaring Crocker's rules does not entitle you to be mean to other commenters. Most importantly, it does not entitle you to challenge the norm of being generally nice to one another. IMHO, your exchange with Alicorn shows the superiority of CR properly understood over the naïve symmetrist approach.