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The topic is inflammatory, which means flamebait guarantees flamewars. The comment was flamebaity in the ways I described. It's possible to write about these things in a less flamebaity way—that's just not the style people reach for by default on the internet. I agree with your second sentence btw.

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as i said it was more lighthearted.

i wrote it at a bus stop after work in London, nothing snarky intended.

ive used bullet points A LOT in many comments over the years.

it used to be “citation needed” back in the day, so i still supply them.

It sounds like I misread you - sorry about that! Moderation is pattern matching and that means making mistakes when the pattern doesn't really match.

Unfortunately, there's a sense in which it still makes no difference because the comment fits the flamewar-starting pattern whether you were posting in that spirit or not. But I would have phrased my reply differently if I'd read you more precisely.

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