You're just tone policing here. You should engage with the actual subject of the discussion, or say nothing at all.

People aren't unemotional robots, and thus don't always conform to prejudices on what constitutes the 'correct' tone.

It's more useful to criticize the substance of a persons words, not how they choose to express them.

I was explaining the issue to the commenter, since they seemed to be expressing honest confusion about why their comment comes across as incendiary. I certainly agree it's better to avoid engaging with inflammatory rhetoric, but we shouldn't let that become a refusal to help people moderate their tone when they don't mean to give offense.

We've had to ask you more than once before to stop doing this sort of flamewar on HN. If you keep doing it, we're going to have to ban you. I'm not going to ban you right now because you posted about octopuses and mopeds recently. But it's not acceptable to flame up the threads like this, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think there's some blanket obligation to be mild mannered. By all means, use incisive language to describe bad things! The problem is with passages like

> but yeah, drop the ol' "Ma' Russians!" into the conversations, and heads explode.

This isn't an attempt to vividly illustrate the problem or an expression of righteous anger. It's just trolling - it accomplishes nothing but inciting people to yell back at you.

It’s fact isn’t it? The US government as well as Americans themselves regularly use crimes done by Russia and China to distract from crimes done by their own government.

Genocide is not happening. You won’t be taken seriously if you make such claims.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily (if not exclusively) for political battle. That's against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, because it moves this place in exactly the opposite direction we want it to go. HN is supposed to be for curious conversation. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.

If you want more explanation about how we moderate this, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Are you kidding? This is absolutely fucking nonsense. I’ve been here for years primarily commenting on infosec related topics as that is where my expertise lies.

Insofar as you continue to allow political topics to remain on the site, which is not content that I submit, people are going to comment on it. When people post bullshit in these political threads, it motivates a response. I’m rarely, if ever, a top level comment.

The uptick in recent comments is simply due to the increasingly politically charged environment and the influx of submissions that are overtly political, or other users propensity to take conversations off topic by interjecting some ideological or partisan nonsense. Like jessaustin here race-baiting every thread and actually advocating domestic terrorism, for example.

You literally replied to a comment I made saying that genocide is not happening. It is, in fact, not happening.

You’ll notice that my comments of this nature are attempts to nip things in the bud and usually call for measured, civilized discourse. HN seems to have an influx of these wannabe communist revolutionaries trying to push their nonsense here. My replies do not advance particular positions, they are an attempt to keep things rational and encourage exposure and debate with opposing viewpoints without the character assassination and demonization that many can’t resist resorting to. Most of the time I’m defending viewpoints that I don’t even agree with.

Maybe you should just get serious about banning political stories. There are other sites for that.

I wasn't replying to a particular comment, but to your recent pattern of using the site. I know you've posted here for years about other topics. That's what I'm trying to persuade you to go back to. I totally get the feeling of needing to counter wrongness with rightness, but it all too easily turns into feeding it. The people on the other side are having the same experience of course.

Banning political stories isn't an option. This is explained at the second link I mentioned: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

> Genocide is not happening

Not, it is not.

In any case, having 201.000 Americans killed in less than a year (after being goose-feeded with fake news to ignore the danger), does not feel like an improvement over the classical stuff. (Without forgetting the rest of covid's victims, of course).

Why is it always brown people whose blood and bones are ground up in the gristmill of the American war machine? Doesn't that seem just a bit genocidal? Even in places like Latin America where the reptiles could choose among a variety of races as collaborators in their monstrous schemes, they somehow always ally with white people to kill indigenous people. This is going on right now in Bolivia, and Venezuela has had this potential for a long time, but historically one must take care to find an uncolored spot on the map. [0]

No one in this thread cares to "be taken seriously" by those who don't acknowledge recent history.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...