[kybernetikos]

Yes, you're criticising the comment, but your criticisms constitute mainly of strong attacks on its tone (ultra-polarized, hysterical, noisy, prattle) and perceived effect (manipulative, obnoxious), plus some extremely strong contradictions without supporting evidence of matching strength (utterly and complete wrong, does not belong on HN).

I do think that you're probably correct with the meat of what you're saying, but there's no question that at best half of your comment is relevant to the actual discussion and the other half describes itself at least as well as it describes the comment it purports to.

My suggestion: your vitriol should be proportional to the strength of the evidence you present rather than to the strength of your feeling.

While technically your comment isn't an ad hominem since you attribute all these terrible things to the comment rather than the person, I can completely see why it rang a lot of the same bells as an ad hominem argument would for some people.