Although political discussions could be problematic for several reasons, I don’t encourage downvoting just because a post comes close to the forbidden territory. It seems that the present discussion could have cleared some misconceptions and have a positive effect. There are few strongly upvoted comments, like this one, which seem to indicate that partial agreement can be found.
My sense is the comments were upvoted because they did a good job explaining the problems with the original post, not because they’re likely to be of much lasting value outside of that context. Partial agreement can be found, but so can flame wars. Everything has upsides; the question is whether they outweigh the downsides.
Although political discussions could be problematic for several reasons, I don’t encourage downvoting just because a post comes close to the forbidden territory. It seems that the present discussion could have cleared some misconceptions and have a positive effect. There are few strongly upvoted comments, like this one, which seem to indicate that partial agreement can be found.
My sense is the comments were upvoted because they did a good job explaining the problems with the original post, not because they’re likely to be of much lasting value outside of that context. Partial agreement can be found, but so can flame wars. Everything has upsides; the question is whether they outweigh the downsides.