That was exactly what I’m talking about. What an interesting story and we have only heard it from a single perspective. Imagine the stories of the people it affected, I’m sure it made someone better off.

You are a fascist control freak.

You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

You can't just hand wave "you've been breaking the rules badly". I haven't done anything of the sort, you know me I can break the rules as I have in the past and stopped doing.

I am expressing myself and sometimes I use sarcasm or reductio ad absurdum and people don't understand. By time they have flagged and downvoted it is too late to edit and give context.

The end result is... they downvote me and no one reads it. The system works. I really don't know what you are talking about, but this wouldn't be my first misunderstanding. Thanks for listening but thread has turned into a waste of people meta-analyzing the comments and it's not worth our time. Life is too short.

My suggetion to you: whoever flagged my comment is wasting your time and should be punished for pearl clutching.

When you post "You are a fascist control freak", there's no need to explain how that's breaking the rules—it should be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You could hardly have broken them more blatantly—for example, the one against name-calling.

If you say you meant something else by it, I believe you, but that sort of intent unfortunately doesn't communicate itself—you have to encode it explicitly in your comment or else it will land with most readers as a garden-variety attack. I realize it sucks to have to do that—it's a constraint on expression—but there are constraints we have to live with in order to have a large, open internet forum that doesn't destroy itself.

If you'd just calibrate your comments to be more substantive and thoughtful, things should be fine.

For the record, this isn't an attack or accusation, it is a thought experiment via reductio ad absurdum.