That's a fair question and I'll try to answer it, but first let me admit that your comment was obviously a far cry from the worst nationalistic flamebait that we see. I think I was primed to read it that way by having seen a barrage of such comments in other contexts earlier that day, none of which were related to what you posted. Maybe if I had seen it in isolation, I wouldn't have scolded you. So you do have a point here.

That said, I think I had a point too. Yes, it's nationalistic—in the sense that we use that term in HN moderation—to make an only-one-country argument that obviously aligns with a good/bad judgment. That's a soft way of saying that one country is better than others, that one is good while another is bad. One sign of this is using honorifics to describe the one and pejoratives to describe the others. Such language is not only about discerning differences, it's about elevating and demoting. Another sign is mentioning facts about one side while omitting obvious corresponding facts about the other side. What you said about the use of armed force, and about building weapons capabilities, were clear examples of this in my opinion—clear enough to make the omission count as flamebait, in the sense that someone else is going to come along with the countervailing facts, angered by your omission of them, and feel justified to take the discussion one notch deeper into hell. Even there, though, you did the most important thing, which was not to reply in kind (or if you did, you at least deleted it). That's the main reason why I was probably a bit too hard on you. This could have been much worse.

Providing sources doesn't add information in this context when the links are expressions of the dominant perspective in the country you consider better. Also, providing sources doesn't cancel out the emotional information encoded (doubtless unintentionally) in your comments.

It's easy to fall into this when you're expressing your perspective in terms that would not, in your home base, count as inflammatory. Indeed, that is an important degree of tolerance and it's commendable and necessary. But it's not sufficient. It isn't enough for your expression to evaluate to tolerant in your own system, because it's the ears of the listener, not the speaker, which condition the effects such statements have. Are you responsible for how your statements are heard by others? Actually yes, here—on a large online forum—you are; we all are. Why? isn't that a violation of individual freedom and responsibility? No, because the alternative, of not considering the effects of our statements, leads to the destruction of the commons (in this case, the Hacker News community), which is in none of our interests. We all have to find ways of expressing our views that don't do that. It's the same principle why we don't have campfires in dry forests, litter in a city park, and so on.

Fortunately, this doesn't mean we can't express our views—or at least mostly doesn't. It means that if we want to have an online community that isn't hell, we have to work to express our views as the guidelines ask—e.g. eschewing flamebait. And we have to work harder at that as a topic becomes more divisive. That means shooting for a level of tolerance that feels counterintuitive, because our intuitions for tolerance are all derived from the much smaller contexts we're personally familiar with. When you're broadcasting to millions of people all over the world, which is exactly what you're doing by posting to HN, such intuitions fail. In that sense we're all on a journey to learn something new here—maybe even something fundamentally new.

I definitely don't mean to pick on you personally. All of us do this and few of us notice it. But when you're responsible like we are for keeping the peace a very large, very international community, you get to notice it because you have to, much as firemen become domain experts in fire hazards.

One last point. I know that when we post like this it sounds like we're moralizing. But that's a bit of an illusion. Yes we're advocating a certain discussion ethics, but we're not making claims to universality. These ethics are relative to a specific type of community: the sort of large, flat, public, anonymous internet forum that Hacker News is. Other types of forum—for example, smaller and more cohesive ones, or ones where people know each other in person—can presumably withstand more intensity, more uncompromising opposition, and so on. That's why I go for concrete analogies like fire hazards, city parks and the like. It's easier to see in such cases how the rules derive from obvious desires we all share, like having buildings not burn down, gardens with nice flowers, and so on. We're not saying it's wrong or immoral to go against HN's rules or that people are bad for doing so. The claim is more empirical: we've learned from over ten years of running this place what works and what doesn't work for achieving the goals of the forum, such as having civil, substantive discussion that doesn't degenerate. And one part of our job is to distill and articulate those learnings in feedback to the system, so it can continue to evolve in complex ways—into something more interesting than scorched earth.