People often say that when they break the site guidelines and we scold them, unless we carefully balance the scales of scolding, and even then sometimes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19635096). It's impossible to balance them perfectly in any case, because the threads are too big for us to read them all.
If you're genuinely concerned about this, you won't have trouble finding plenty of scoldings of commenters you disagree with by looking through https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang and https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb. We don't much care about people's political alignments when they break the site guidelines. People think we are, but this is mostly a function of their own political alignment, especially when they feel passionately about it.
From our perspective the important thing to understand is that someone else breaking the site guidelines (or just being wrong) doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. This isn't a personal point or a political one. It applies to all of us.
If you're genuinely concerned about this, you won't have trouble finding plenty of scoldings of commenters you disagree with by looking through https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang and https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb. We don't much care about people's political alignments when they break the site guidelines. People think we are, but this is mostly a function of their own political alignment, especially when they feel passionately about it.
From our perspective the important thing to understand is that someone else breaking the site guidelines (or just being wrong) doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. This isn't a personal point or a political one. It applies to all of us.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html