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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The last thing we need is for a thread about food production to get sucked into the nearest black hole, which is precisely what comments like this one invoke.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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As others have pointed out, the original article features an ideological undercurrent that remains mostly implicit. I referred to another article of the same author which makes those ideological assumptions explicit, thereby clarifying his political stance. If this is considered flamebait, then it seems that clarity needs to be avoided where it might cause controvery.

Let's assume that's so—what does it matter? The article was interesting for reasons other than its implicit ideology. Making it explicit so as to fight it is stepping into the ideological battle that we don't want here. We have more than enough of that. Everything is implicitly ideological anyway.

Re "avoiding clarity": if you change the subject, that deprives the thread of clarity on the points that actually made it interesting. And if you change it to a flamewar, that just fills the comments with fire and smoke, which does nothing for clarity. It just gets people venting and yelling at each other.

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