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addressing their extreme rhetoric, not them. How they come across is different than who they are. Every statement was a "swipe" at their disrespectful and unreasonable arguments, not them as a person.That's not how internet comments work. If you tell someone they sound like a zealot, you're calling names. If you then say "I didn't mean it about you, only about how you sound", that's a distinction that makes no difference to the receiver, with whom your comment has already landed like a punch.
I'm afraid the problem is that your comments aren't as respectful as you think they are. This is a common problem, as I tried to explain above. Swipes that feel harmless or perfectly kosher to the commenter can easily land with readers, and especially with whomever they're replying to, as aggressive.
Because of this asymmetry, it's easy to end up with a flamewar in which all parties feel aggrieved, like they're the innocent one who did nothing, while the other is the one who behaved badly and escalated. Everyone ends up feeling like they're just defending themselves from unprovoked attack. In reality we're all subject to this cognitive bias, and if we're to avoid having this place go into a downward spiral and burn itself to a crisp, we all need to be extra careful to err on the side of being respectful and editing swipes out of our posts here.
I was writing about this in another context, in case or anyone wants more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25995375.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html