I disagree, obviously. If "strong emotions" were enough to diminish impact and authority, the ad business would simply be placards of bullet points. Even on HN

I disagree, obviously. If "strong emotions" were enough to diminish impact and authority, the ad business would simply be placards of bullet points. Even on HN, well-written and cool posts routinely are ignored or actively downvoted. In the grand scheme of things, politeness is a good idea--but there are a few places where being nice simply won't get you as far as calling somebody out passionately on their wrongness. Low-level systems programming on large codebases with smart and stubborn and harried people is one of those cases.