> Curious that you're downvoted without comment [...] As an outsider to the US bunfight, your statement seems, based on what we see, pretty self-evident. I did

> Curious that you're downvoted without comment [...] As an outsider to the US bunfight, your statement seems, based on what we see, pretty self-evident. I didn't cast any vote in the thread, but here's an explanation. If I did decide to vote, I would definitely downvote it, since it only repeats a cliche that has been said over a thousand times, even though I, too, consider it as "fact". The problem is, saying "Trump is racist and divisive" does not add any new insight to the discussion, and the only outcome is attracting angry yelling from the most politically biased people, hence triggering an unproductive flamewar (I think you've just experienced exactly what I described. When you said "what in the god damn was that", I think you could see my points already). When I see something like this, I usually downvotes all related comments and their replies regardless of which side they're arguing for (thus, all angry pro-Trump and anti-Trump comments would be downvoted - only downvoting the original thread is unfair), as nothing good can come out of it. I believe this strategy can promote what the Hacker News Guidelines is trying to achieve. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Saying either "$controversial_politician is good" or "$controversial _politician is bad" violates all of those Guidelines above. For controversial political discussions, I found the worst thing you can do is posting a general criticism, such as "$something is bad". Instead of doing that, a better strategy is talking about a specific issue, for example, instead of saying "$politician is bad", it's better to pick and criticize one of his policies, and to analyse its perceived harmful effects due to the policy. The more specific the criticism, the better. While it's still saying "$politican is bad", but it contains new insights and information that prevent the discussion from being dragged into a name-calling flamewar (it may still be a flamewar, but with fewer name-calling posts and more discussions). I found it dramatically improves the quality of discussions.