As pvg pointed out, "facts" are a red herring here. You can make non-factual statements that aren't flamewar and you can make factual statements that are. Sticking to "facts" is actually one of the favorite tricks of trolls (I'm not saying anyone was trolling in this case—it's just an instructive example) because then when you say "please don't troll" they can say "what part of my perfectly factual statement do you have a problem with". https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The problem with the flamebait sentence I was objecting to was twofold: (1) it was political rhetoric of precisely the kind you would read in a political publication or hear in a political broadcast, and (2) it took the thread on a generic ideological tangent, that is it replaced the topic of Cuban work on covid vaccines with a much larger, more general, and more inflammatory one. Yes, it's related; the word "tangent" implies that; but that's not enough. It reliably leads to much worse discussion, and predictably did so in this case. I've been trying to explain this to HN for many years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There's nothing different about the moderation practice in this case—it was utterly routine. But two things were different: (a) I wrote more hastily than I usually do and didn't calibrate my language very well; and (b) something about the specific question of Cuba appears to land differently with HN's internationally distributed community than most subjects do.

The items I labelled "Factual" are things like "island" or "small" -- I was very careful about highlighting the possibly controversial parts of that sentence.

However, the funny thing is that there was no ideological flame war in response to the comment. Why? Because there was nothing there that anyone even disagrees with or find inflammatory.

In fact, the only reactions have been to your (in my opinion) overreaction.

> there was no ideological flame war in response to the comment

To which comment? If you mean the original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654110), that's quite wrong. The flamewar reactions were why I replied in the first place. Some of them are dead and/or collapsed now.

It's trivial to write a flame-generating comment made entirely of facts, 'factual' isn't quite the defense against this you might think it is.