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.