Can you clearly state: 1. why the comment was "irrelevant"? 2. how the poster could have known what other commenters would have posted in reaction to his comment?

Spiraling comment threads create an opportunity for an expansive discourse with multiple potential paths. Given that a rule violation wasn't cited as well as the fact that the whole chain has been flagged and dead'd, i have to wonder why someone of your renown saw fit to contribute to what you described as a tangential discussion. The political downvoting was enough to earmark the discussion as wrongthink. Please don't get me banned for questioning your motives; it is a dead chain anyways.

She is probably the #1 person (in both volume and quality) talking about the Hajnal line over the past 5-10 years, and is how I originally heard about it, so it's not really irrelevant or political. It is a tangent, I guess.