For instance, the response of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226101 is even more polarizing. Yes, the followup's flamey nature adds to the indictment of the original comment. But due to the upvotes I'm guessing that the viewpoint of the follow up, if it were making a non-argumentative top-level point, would be less likely to be flagged as "trolling". Because impartial rules are still ultimately enforced by people, who inherently have biases.

It would be great if all overly political comments could be eliminated [0], but I don't see how that's going to happen. So the tradeoff is either having low-quality irreconcilable flaming, or preventing such by marginalizing dissent and encouraging a groupthink that permeates discussion but can never be called out - the noise will still be present, just masquerading as signal. IMHO it would be better for violent disagreements to act as flypaper and be more easily ignored, ideally through technical features.

[0] I guess that would necessarily include all non-technical anti-surveillance articles/comments as well, due to the opposing viewpoint of pro-surveillance. I don't think it would be good for this community to neuter itself in the fight against surveillance, but here I am showing my own bias.