Poorly informed ranters wanting to debate does sound annoying, I didn't realize there was a problem with that. It seems to me the best way to deter them would be to paste a link that's directly related to their points and ignore them.

If you're willing to make Crocker's rules a codified and accepted norm of the "hard discussion area", you might as well go the whole way and make it very clear to ranters how wrong they are, in the most obnoxious way you can come up with - including flames, status putdowns, etc.

Yes it sounds distasteful and it is, but it has some very compelling advantages: (1) it deters other users from naïvely expending effort on unproductive discussions, which is something Eliezer has been complaining about; (2) it will hopefully discourage the vast majority of ranters, thus allowing us to minimize the scope of controversial technical measures such as bans and posting restrictions and restrict them to the most intractable cases.

Just "pasting a link that's relevant to their points" is not nearly enough to discourage anyone.