Agreed. Especially when you don't know the context of the discussion and it gives the feeling of LW being about a small clique of people and their issues, rather than actually talking about interesting things.
I would think that being anchored by a strong (possibly uncharacteristic) recent event would make one's judgment worse, which is (part of!) why I avoided giving that context, and said as much.
I consider meta discussion in general tiresome, and meta discussion that is being used as a code for personal disputes particularly tiresome.
Its not a matter of judgement as a matter of what I am interesting in discussing and what I am in favour of seeing on LessWrong. For example, I could engage in a discussion of literary theory without bias, but don't particularly want to do so, and don't think LessWrong would be the place to do so. I would be especially averse to such a discussion if it was being used as some sort of proxy for a dispute between two people. There are other places to discuss literary theory, and other better ways to resolve personal disputes.
In light of recent (and potential) events, I wanted to start a discussion here about a certain method of handling conflicts on this site's discussion threads, and hopefully form a consensus on when to use the measure described in the title. Even if the discussion has no impact on site policy ("executive veto"), I hope administrators will at least clarify when such a measure will be used, and for what reason.
I also don't want to taint or "anchor" the discussion by offering hypothetical situations or arguments for one position or another. Rather, I simply want to ask: Under what conditions should a specific poster, "Alice" be prohibited from replying directly to the arguments in a post/comment made by another poster, "Bob"? (Note: this is referring specifically to replies to ideas and arguments Bob has advanced, not general comments about Bob the person, which should probably go under much closer scrutiny because of the risk of incivility.)
Please offer your ideas and thoughts here on when this measure should be used.