(Can someone please clarify) how was that ideological rhetoric? Are these not historical facts? And if they are, aren't they relevant to a story about political instability in Haiti? Is Haitian politics itself off-topic? It seems like it's such emotionally charged territory due to its agonizing history that containing all the flame wars would constitute a de facto ban on the topic.

Edit: really? There's a whole other thread making these exact same points that didn't get flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761847

Yes you can clearly see the contrast between that thread and this one, starting from the root comments, and that's the point: it's possible to have a factual discussion, and it's possible to start a massive flamewar with exactly the same underlying facts. The burden is on commenters to contribute in ways that are likely to lead to the former, not the latter. Of course you can't know for sure what the effects will be, but you can play the odds. These things are fairly predictable.

(Btw, I've partly answered your other questions in a different comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27776445)

Here are some principles that have emerged over the years here, as supports for the kind of discussion we're hoping for:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Intent doesn't communicate itself on the internet, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The value of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Trolling can only be measured by effects, not intent. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Scorched earth is not interesting. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm afraid I still don't exactly understand where the post erred, because I think it provided valuable context that I was not aware of. OTOH I'm not the mod who had to deal with the mess, so if you say this is where the leak is, I've got to take your word for it.

> Trolling can only be measured by effects, not intent.

While I hope that principal helps you do your job, I also hope I never encounter it anywhere else. It's a free backdoor to deplatform anyone at anytime. Brigade the discussion and suddenly they're the troll. Yikes.

> Brigade the discussion and suddenly they're the troll. Yikes.

If such brigading occurs, obviously that trumps the other principle and needs to be dealt with strictly.

> But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of pun­ishing winners who weren't supposed to win.

> permanent debt peonage

> the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms

...all seem like ideological rhetoric, and barely "facts".

> the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms

See, I read that in a sarcastic "how dare they" tone. Maybe that's why I don't think it's controversial.

> But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of pun­ishing winners who weren't supposed to win.

Are you saying the debt/embargoes weren't meant to be punitive? "Weren't supposed to win" being the prevailing attitude of global economic powers of the time.

What monumental cowardice. The "high ideological rhetoric" is something not even mildly "ideological". And then it's their fault that the shitty dudebros of HN had a fit?

Please ban me from the orange hellsite so that I'm never tempted on commenting something ever again, while you reflect on why you're defending such garbage people

You're demonstrating the very vector into internet dudgeon that I'm talking about.

Yes, commenters do bear some responsibility for the subthreads that come from their comments. These things are pretty predictable, after all. (To be fair, I probably came down on cryptohacks a little too harshly—it's an occupational hazard, especially after hours of cleaning up shit—sorry, cryptohacks. But the principles hold good.)

I don't agree that it's cowardice to go for substantive discussion rather than people screaming at each other and losing their minds off-topically. I'd say it takes some courage to do that. What strikes me as closer to cowardice (not the best way to put it, but we'll go with your word) is defining one side of these bloodbaths-in-a-teacup as virtuous and the other side as "garbage people", instead of facing the truth that they are co-creations.

Btw, I like Graeber. I personally protected his account on HN and made sure he got to say everything he wanted to here. I think his death was a loss for intellectual life—he may not have been a meticulous scholar but his creativity is not the sort of thing that comes along very often. I think making a big deal out of that one lame sentence about Apple is an example of the stupidest sort of internet battle. At the same time, of course he was an ideological writer and of course that paragraph is ideological rhetoric. That it also contains facts doesn't change that; that's what good rhetoricians do.

Nor is there anything wrong with that paragraph in its original context in a book—a genre where the volume knob needs to be turned up quite a bit at times, and generally wielded with a lot of variation. But McLuhan got it right, the medium is the message, and copy-pasting that paragraph into an internet thread on an inflammatory topic is definitely flamebait. We're trying to learn how to avoid that here because the threads it produces are repetitive, and therefore tedious, and therefore turn nasty. That's really all I'm saying—anything else people are adding onto it (such as secret political agendas, positions on Haitian history, or whatever) is imaginary.