[dang]

I've given the users attacking you a thorough scolding for breaking the site guidelines, but you've also been breaking the site guidelines by using this site for flamewar, by posting excessively on this issue and dropping swipes like "you Assange conspiracists" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24408007). It's not surprising that you provoked this sort of reaction from others on the opposite side of the issue from you. That's not cool, and if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to using this site as intended, we'd appreciate it.

To use HN as intended means primarily posting thoughtful, substantive comments on topics of intellectual curiosity. Internet polemics are tedious and nasty, and that gets truer as the topic gets hotter and more sensational. Assange threads, for example, already years ago became repetitive to the point of utter pointlessness. Nobody's convincing anybody—people are just beating each other with the same talking points over and over. If that's the game you want to play on the internet, please do it somewhere else.

[foldr]

There's some justice in what you say, and I'll do as you request. But you engage in victim blaming when you suggest that anything I've posted could reasonably have generated the 'reaction' of being accused of being a paid shill of some kind. Especially when, as you point out, this allegation is obviously false. A swipe, ill-judged as it may be, is not in the same league as a near-libellous and utterly false accusation. In this case, the person who 'reacted' isn't even the person at whom the swipe was directed, but someone who decided to trawl through my post history to dig up dirt (as they saw it).

[dang]

I didn't suggest that. On the contrary—that's why I scolded the others for doing it.

[foldr]

That's how I interpreted "It's not surprising that you provoked...That's not cool". Thanks for clarifying.