No idea about the rules as written, but I think it's absolutely reasonable to respond to someone engaging. If that's against the rules, those are some strange rules.

I think that dunking for an audience isnt a very fair description for the person you responded to, to be fair to them. It did seem to be engaging with your expressed beliefs directly. Many of these conversations are done so for an audience (what's the point of talking to someone that you might not convince instead of focusing on the 60 people reading it that might be?).

It was a lot of topic switching happening, for sure, but I think you contributed equally if not more to that (intentionally or not, because all inserted claims become fair game). It still is annoying to be chasing a thread that constantly escapes though (the feeling I get when comments seem to continue veering into every related topic under the umbrella) and that's why I'm in support of you just calling for the disengage like you did.

Fair points.

The main reason I felt like that is because they plainly ignored everything I wrote except the parts that they felt they could most easily attack. Ignored my counters to the claims, and just dropped in new claims. If it's not gish-galloping, at least it's gish gallop adjacent. I'd like to think I'm pretty good at at least acknowledging "Hey, I don't have a reasonable response to what you said, I'll think about it".

Yes, I wanted to get out of that because it was clear that the conversation wasn't about what we were talking about anymore, but point-scoring and dunking for the audience. That's why I disengaged.