"I don't mean to be" easily translates into "There's a hell of a long conversation here, with a lot of qualifiers, but frankly I don't have the time for it. Instead I'm just going to offer some generalization that you can easily throw rocks at. I know that you will, and now I'm telling you to have fun with it."

So if I say "I don't mean to be old grumpy guy" that means that what comes out of my mouth next will be a generalization and summary of my feelings that I fully know for all intents and purposes sounds like old grumpy guy. Sorry, can't be helped. That's the way the summary looks.

Most of the time people do not use such linguistic qualifiers out of some desire for self-protection or having some mechanism to inoculate them from some horrible thing that follows. It's simply a shortcut. I always thought this was pretty obvious.

I know pg posted this, and it's his site, but is there really something here worthy of this being on the front page? Is this some kind of clever editorial about the quality of the commenting? If so, I don't get it. People are trying to be nice about their criticisms?