Calm down! I'm not saying what you think I'm saying.

First off, I suggested you go and introduce yourself on the welcome thread in part because that's usually good for a few upvotes, and that avoids the annoying feature where people with negative karma can't comment more than once every 10 minutes or so. I think there should be a buffer, because getting a comment downvoted isn't such a rare or awful thing on LW, but in lieu of that it's worth it to make an effort to get some karma at first.

Again, the downvotes are more about style than substance. We don't run our arguments here the way they happen elsewhere on the Internet, and because of that we have fewer flamewars and more real arguments. If you want to discuss things with us, you might have to adopt a different style than usual. I know that's an asshole thing of me to say, but that's how it is.

Finally, I'm not at all arguing against determinism, and I'm not defending the current post. Determinism holds without exception, and the idea of free will as most people think of it is incoherent. However, just stopping there isn't actually sufficient: it remains to ask why we feel that we have free will— are those feelings an illusion, and if so, why do we have them in the first place, or are they a reflection of something that actually goes on within the deterministic mind, and if so, why do they feel to us like something incompatible with determinism?

Those questions are a lot more interesting, and don't just go away once one realizes that the universe is deterministic in nature.