The "bitflipped" version expanded the theme from whistleblowers to "powerful people" — that's where I think it fell down. In both cases there are broad general

The "bitflipped" version expanded the theme from whistleblowers to "powerful people" — that's where I think it fell down. In both cases there are broad generalizations being made, but in my version I was careful to circle back to the smaller theme. I try to do this consistently because avoiding "generic tangents" is in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. In retrospect, rather than relying on context, I could have explicitly qualified the final sentence to clarify that I was speaking of the relative weight of individuals and organizations in US society specifically with regards to the outcome of whistleblowing. I'd like to think there's something I could have done to have earned a more generous reading from you so we don't end up in a rhetorical gotcha game.