Soothmoother, I agree, and I do try to discipline myself to describe arguments as conspiracy theory or otherwise, rather than labelling people – an application of Craig’s “play the ball, not the man; engage with arguments rather than with commenters” rule.
But I’m only human and certain styles of argument get very frustrating. A case in point arises as I attempt to compose this… those I shouldn’t call conspiracy theorists simply don’t accept refutation; they just go quiet when any of their points are disproved, and then raise them again, usually on a different thread and when I’m not there to counter them.
As an engineer you surely understand this point. Fault-finding in a system is aided by elimination. We may have favoured the proposition that the springle sprocket was causing the problem, but we replaced it with a known good one and the fault persisted. So we agree to reject that proposition and move on. We don’t sidle off quietly so we can suggest the sprocket proposition to a different team just because it’s our pet theory and we might convince them, and certainly not because our sprocket supplier is Bill Gates who’s rich and powerful, and also incidentally supplied our test instruments which might therefore be rigged to give misleading results :/ But these are standard argument procedures in conspiracy theory, and objecting gets you accused of being “brainwashed by the MSM”, mindlessly “supporting the official story”, or worse, being a secret agent for Bill Gates!
My words can’t help with your loss, but I’m sorry. Thank you for reasoned discussion too.