"Benefit of the doubt"

Yes, giving (or not giving) someone the benefit of the doubt on a particular occasion involves your opinions about the personally and not just what they've done on that occasion. No, I don't see why that should be a problem. (Suppose an LW poster whom you know to be sensible and intelligent posts something that seems surprisingly stupid. I hope you'll give serious consideration to the possibility that you've misunderstood, or they're being ironic, or there's some subtlety they've seen and you haven't. Failing that, you'll probably guess that for whatever reason they're having a bad day. Whereas if someone whose contributions you regard as generally useless posts something stupid-looking you'll probably just think "oh yeah, them again". And there's nothing wrong with any of that.)

The worst problem with mass-downvoting of the sort Eugine got booted for isn't that his voting wasn't completely blind to who wrote the things he was voting on. It's that it ignored everything else.

(And: Yes, it is a violation of the professed norms around here to vote something down just because you disapprove of its author's views. You ask that question as if we're faced with a bunch of examples of people doing that, but I'm not seeing them.)

Hobby horses

LW has a bunch of pet topics. Effective altruism has (not always by that name) always been one of them. If someone only ever posts on LW about effective altruism, that in itself doesn't make their contributions unhelpful. PUA is not in that situation; my impression is that a few people on LW are really interested in it, a (larger) few are really offended by it, and most just aren't interested. So someone posting only about PUA is (all else being equal) providing much less value to LW than someone posting only about EA.

But all else is not equal. What advancedatheist is accused of isn't merely posting only about PUA, it's shoehorning PUA into discussions where it doesn't belong. If someone did that with EA, I think there would be plenty of complaints and downvotes flying around after a while.

"Not exactly the same"

"Not exactly the same as the tarred-and-feathered pariah" is a pretty good defence, when the attack it's facing is "see, you're doing the same as the tarred-and-feathered pariah". And actually what I'm saying is "Quite substantially less bad than the tarred-and-feathered pariah". And you may recall that it was controversial whether Eugine should be sanctioned for his actions; so what I'm saying is actually "Quite substantially less bad than that guy whose behaviour we had trouble deciding whether to punish".

Piling on

If someone posts something lots of people don't like for political reasons and it gets jumped on for political reasons: no, I don't like it much. Nor for that matter if they post something lots of people do like for political reasons and it gets upvoted to the skies.

It may at this point be worth remarking that, so far as I can see, advancedatheist's comments are not heavily downvoted overall right now. Maybe that's partly because of this discussion; I don't know. But it doesn't actually seem as if he's being greatly harmed, or his comments being effectively silenced, on account of their political content.

Anyway: as I say, I think it's a shame if something gets a huge pile of negative karma merely for being politically unpopular. But unacceptable or inconsistent with professed norms hereabouts? No, I don't think so.

Kaj's comments on social conservatives

I didn't dispute that Kaj agreed he'd been too negative about social conservatives. I did dispute (and continue to dispute) that he did anything remotely resembling saying that they're in league with Lucifer. What Kaj agreed with you about was the first of those; what you've claimed here and I've disagreed with is the second.

And no -- for reasons I've already given, but you've completely ignored -- it was not an instance of the scenario JoshuaZ described. Because

• what JoshuaZ described was someone chucking in irrelevant anti-Republican comments into discussions they're irrelevant to; whereas
• Kaj's article was all about dealing with political disagreement, a lot of it was about how important it is to understand your political opponents and not strawman them, and it just happened he didn't do as good a job as he should have of doing that (even though, as I think we agree, he was trying to).

These are not remotely the same thing. Irrelevant politically-charged asides versus mentioning politics in an article about politics. Overt hostility to a particular group versus limited ability to portray a group accurately.

(Also: you can only cast one vote on a given article. The paragraph you didn't like was one of dozens. I see no reason to think that what got Kaj's article applauded and upvoted was that he misrepresented social conservatives rather than all the other stuff in it. Is it your opinion that if an article or comment contains anything in it that is less than perfectly charitable to the author's political opponents, it should be downvoted? You might want to be careful about your answer.)