When you say that I "could've/should've probably realized" that a commenter meant the opposite of what he posted, consider what you're asking for at scale: that we understand what commenters mean regardless of what they say. It may have been obvious to you what that particular comment meant (but did you read it before he edited it to say the opposite, and understand it the correct way? If not, then the luxury of hindsight is at work here.) Different things are obvious to each of us. The things that are obvious to me are easy, so the question is, what about the things that aren't obvious? Translate what you're saying into a general moderation strategy and apply it to those cases and it turns into a requirement to be a mind reader. That I can't do.
In your analysis of the original comment you skipped over "Iran is not Saudi Arabia or anything like that". To me that means you're not reading the comment nearly closely enough to assess how provocative these things are. Perhaps this national swipe happened to align with your own politics and so was less visible to you qua national swipe (I'm sure that's true for most readers here). Nevertheless a national swipe is clearly what it was, however unintentional, and the point we're trying to make over and over to HN users—including our esteemed users from Iran, who are as welcome here as all others—is that it doesn't matter how unintentional that is or even how accurate it is. When you post like this, the flames that result burn the same way as any others. If we don't want HN to be a war zone, we all need to take care of it.
It seems like part of what surprised you is that I told the commenter directly that if we would ban him if he continued to ignore the moderation request. HN has a lot of comments coming through the firehose. I post a lot, but the total of what I post is negligible (a good thing!), so it's unsurprising that you hadn't seen a comment like that before. It's actually pretty standard:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
It is intended to provide clear information about what happens when we've let someone know that they're breaking the rules and ask them to stop, but instead of receiving the feedback they argue and make protests. Why do we do this? Because for some users, it's better this way. For whatever reason, some people don't respond well to polite coaxing but the clear line, "if you do this again, we will ban you", actually works for them in the sense that they then proceed to use the site as intended. When dealing with thousands of users one soon learns that different 'channels' work for different people and one tries to select the channel that's indicated in a situation. Probably this was the wrong selection here, but (short of being a mind reader) it's impossible to make correct selections at scale when a comment says the opposite of what it means. Had I encountered a comment that read, "I didn't want to start a flamewar", I would not have switched to channel B; I would have stuck with channel A (polite coaxing), given a fuller explanation, and said something like "Please stop".
As for my having been in haste, to me that's the root cause of the misunderstanding because with more time to reflect I could have adjusted my reaction to be subtly different. Yet this too has a systemic aspect. HN has a small number of moderators and we all work weekends. HN never stops, but we have to. (We don't stop as much as we should, but that's an occupational hazard and a different story.) Sometimes moderating in haste is unavoidable because the alternative would be never being available to do anything else in life—and I assure you that would not lead to HN being better. So while it's bad to moderate in haste and we don't like to do it and we generally avoid it, trying to avoid it completely would be a mistake.