The difference is that it's pretty acceptable for you to reject family requests for money, it doesn't make you a pariah and being a pariah doesn't carry the same consequences when non-family institutions govern society.

The article spends a lot of time belaboring this point: you don't have to do what your family asks you to do in developed countries. On the other hand, becoming outcast from your family in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.

You don't have to care how apolitical it is but the partisan political nature of the post, which it starts and ends with, is why the HN thread is reacting to and discussing partisan politics. What makes it partisan is the shift from admonishing the government to justifying the partisan "irresponsible demagogues" that are currently brutalizing Minnesota by pointing to the blue-state government's slow prosecution of Somali immigrants.

When Charlie Hebdo was bombed and shot, I suppose what people should have been writing is a technical post about the poor quality of their work with tips on how to convey the same artistic point in a way that doesn't invite fanatics to bomb and shoot them, concluding that by not reining in their bad work they have ceded the field to people who will not be gentle in their proposals. Then you can comment things like "What do I care how apolitical it is? The art is what we should care about. That's what the post is about".

Edit: maybe a better analogy would be 9/11 with the US and Al Qaeda, where the US would be less innocent in your political sensibility than Charlie Hebdo and the dynamic I hypothesized was more real.

You don't need to ask people to assume every blue-state government was bad, Nick "name a Democrat city that's prospering right now" Shirley will do that after you, you just have to tee him up by saying the first part: "we need every government body we run to be completely on the ball".

I doubt you yourself are engaging in bad faith (of course I recognize your username) but it's still a bad-faith demand to expect "completely on the ball" behavior above reproach and your intentions don't matter when you echo the demand.

For the author, it wasn't enough to simply recognize a failure to prosecute fraud fast enough, such a failure must be characterized as the cause of the irresponsible demagoguery that followed. Then turns around and wonders why his article isn't treated as the apolitical dissection of fraud that he claims it to be.

No government body is run completely on the ball, which is why it's such an effective bad-faith demand.

I don't even know where this belief comes from. I'm certainly not aware of any historical scenario where authoritarian regimes end when their opponents finally embody perfect behavior above reproach.