On: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

[raydev]

That linked comment is really just a description of Scalia's stance. How can one say "here's why Scalia is bad" without being called out for being inappropriate? Even people who've listed their grievances with sources are being downvoted to gray.

Am I correct in saying a commenter is only encouraged to praise a person, and if that can't be done, to only describe without opinion?

edit: and to be clear, this is comment is unrelated to the flamewar above

[dang → raydev]

I originally thought bradleyjg was being more critical than that, but you might be right. Edit: here's a good example of substantive criticism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096847

It's definitely not the case that one can only praise a person or describe without opinion. But I would push back a little against the formulation "Person X is bad". That's the sort of thing people say about an enemy, and one can't have civil discourse and war at the same time.

It's better to criticize something a person did or said than to denounce the whole of them. Not one of us would like to be regarded as merely the sum of the bad we did, nor would we consider it fair.