Dan I don't think that comment was designed to be religious flamebait. It may seem like sectarianism if you're not Catholic so I understand feeling this way, but the people who are the most angry about Catholic priests raping children are people that grew up Catholic like myself.
Ie, this isn't attacking anyone on the basis of their religion.
I'd probably say the comment could be improved by adding a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Pope_John_Paul_II instead of 'that bastard' but criticism of people that facilitate child abuse is quite reasonable and very separate from attacking members of a particular religion.
That’s the reason I called it out as respectfully as I could. I was hoping OP would edit the comment given the rest of it is valid and gets the same point across.
In honor of Sinead’s death it seems appropriate to tear to shreds the image of John Paul II. You are on the wrong side, morally speaking, in this Dang.
It's simply the practical question of what type of site HN is trying to be. We want curious conversation, not people bashing each other, which is what flamebait leads to.
Commenters who get too sure of their moral positions tend to do a lot of this. I'm not saying the moral positions are wrong (I probably agree a lot of the time, certainly Sinead did a courageous thing, etc. etc.). But the quality of discussion this leads to is predictably poor, evokes worse from others, and tends to go straight to the bottom of the internet barrel. We're trying to not get sucked completely into that muck here—a difficult task to even partly achieve, so we need everyone's help.
I mostly like the moderation on this site, but I think you're missing the mark on this one.
The man - and the institution - facilitated and covered up the abuse and rape of countless children. Calling him a bastard seems pretty small potatoes for you to start clutching your pearls over.
One has to distinguish the importance of a topic from the quality of internet conversation about it. We moderate for the latter, not the former. Most important topics, including most atrocities, don't make HN's front page, and most things that do make the front page are neither important nor an atrocity.
People tend to respond to activating topics with intense pre-existing feelings. That's understandable—I'm not criticizing it and it would be futile to try to change it. But it does not make for curious conversation, which is what HN is for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Curious conversation is about learning new things, changing one's orientation, and so on. That's one reason why the best HN threads tend to have a whimsical aspect—when a topic isn't high-stakes and one doesn't have a pre-existing position about it, curiosity is the natural state. Not so much otherwise.
I think his last sentence doesn't go far enough - I'm not sure how far I'd need to go to describe someone who covered up systemic child abuse on a global scale
Same in Ireland, some high profile cases were prosecuted- but not the majority, and nothing happened the nuns - especially the evil that ran the mother and baby homes. 300+ babies discarded in a septic tank.
Thank you. No mention of prosecutions in that article. Perhaps many of the people who were in charge are no longer alive, but perhaps some still there. There's no mention of it that I see.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html