[dang]

What you're saying would be fine if topics all came up in a vacuum with no priors and could be treated and dissected interchangeably. But that's very much not the case. In the real world we have to deal with, the topic of sexual harassment has a long history. In the context of that history, a comment responding to a claim of sexual harassment by dismissively belittling it is breaking the HN guidelines—not just the one I mentioned above, but others too, like this one:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Not to mention:

"Eschew flamebait."

And I think we could add this one too:

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

I'm not saying people have to accept everything that gets said in every such article, but there's an art to addressing these things without blowing up the thread. Many of the comments in this thread are on the wrong side of that line.

[simondotau]

That's a fine standard. I would, with some trepidation, dare to say that the article being linked to here egregiously fails that standard on all counts.

[tptacek]

He's describing the standard for HN, not for all writing everywhere. People on HN have a bad habit of forgetting that most things on the Internet weren't written for HN. Blog post authors aren't obligated to satisfy any of our rules, but if you want to talk about a blog post here, you're obligated to follow all of them.

[simondotau]

I don't disagree with any of that and, for what it's worth, speaking for myself, is completely self-evident.

My original point (such as it is) is only to note that no debate is one-sided and that if we are setting a high standard of discussion in the Hacker News guidelines, it should be respectful of all, not just the views of the article being linked to. If we are obligated to acknowledge the strongest parts of the complaint, then it seems fair to obligate equal acknowledgement of the strongest parts of any response/rebuttal/defence.

[dang]

Again I think you'd be making a good point there except that it leaves out externalities like flamebait which have the power to overwhelm and destroy good discussion. Imagine a public debate in a theater. Does it make sense to consider your opponent's strongest arguments? Sure it does—but not if the theater is on fire. The first priority has to be to put out the fire, or to try to prevent fires in the first place.

It's so much more complicated even than that because (1) the debaters are often themselves the ones setting the place on fire as they make their points; (2) they're most often doing it unintentionally; (3) there's no agreement about what the solid points are and what the flames are; (4) anyone in the audience is free to add any new point or any blast of flames at any moment.

Now try to be a theater operator with the goal of having good debates, a happy audience, and not burning down.

[simondotau]

I was responding to what was said at the time, which was ONLY that the post failed in "acknowledging the strongest parts of the complaint." No accusation of flamebait was raised when I provided my original response.

(And for what it's worth, I don't agree that the post qualifies as flamebait.)

[dang]

We can certainly disagree about particular calls because they're matters of interpretation. What I was trying to explain is why your argument doesn't work in the general case; that (for me) is the more important point.