I'm sorry, dang. I appreciate your work here. I like to use farce to point out what I see as inconvenient truths. I can accept that they're not welcome here.
Short comments are fine in general, but short inflammatory or snarky comments tend to be flamebait. If you're posting about something divisive, please make the comment more thoughtful.
It's not just—or even primarily—about the quality of your own comment, but the quality of the other comments it is likely to lead to. In other words, the real issue is the systemic effect on the site.
> They may be short and sweet but I certainly don't feel they're unsubstantive.
Your comment is visible through enabling flagged/dead comments in settings, and now that I've enabled it—I really don't see the value that this specific comment adds. It broadly derides a class of workers (regardless of whether we actually hold them in high regard) without materially contributing to the conversation.
Commentary of this nature does largely invite simple, emotional agreement in forums with a more instinctive hive mentality (versus the intellectual hive mentality which arises here, a challenge I'm not discounting generally but am subtracting from this equation). What it generally doesn't do is invite informed conversation.
It scratches an itch, and judging from how thoroughly your comment was both modded down and flagged, it looks like it scratches an itch Hackernews doesn't have.
Tl;Dr: dang might be the decider, but his decision was informed by flags, which speaks to the nature of the discourse desired here. The comment was just out of place. It's a better fit for Reddit, but most of us who are active here are specifically here in search of a respite from that.
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If I were to reply to your comment in search of an actual conversation over this, it would probably be more along the lines of:
> I doubt the politicians themselves came up with this. More likely it was drafted by a think tank, an institution with a vested interest, or a committee constituted of the above. Can't blame the politicians for investigating whether there's a challenge here that'll help their constituents; it's literally their job.
