This comment breaks the HN guidelines badly by bringing extraneous flamebait into a substantive and interesting thread, turning it into a political flamewar. That may not be arson but it is criminal negligence. Please don't do it in HN threads.

It's up to each of us to prevent this, just like we don't light cigarettes at gas stations or let campfires smolder in dry forests. That's not hard. I feel like Smokey the Bear.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

May I suggest ten close readings of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374168 (once for each comment currently in this off-topic subthread) as a good example of what we do want: substantive, grounded in experience, civil, teaching something new.

Edit: I want to add something about the mechanism at work here. Not to pick on you, but as an illustration for everyone.

If we look at the path taken by this subthread, what can we say about it? It gets consistently more generic. That is, it starts with something specific (a self-observation of Scandinavian culture), swaps that out for something much more generic (small towns: good or bad?), goes to more generic and inflammatory things (gang violence) and then to informational heat death ("Religions can inspire peace or war").

So we can sum up how to avoid the unwanted this way: Don't go generic. Note that that's not the same thing as "don't go off-topic". Going off topic can be fine if the direction is interesting. The trouble with the generic is that's predictable and seductive, producing not only the uninteresting but a lot of it.

(I might come back and add more here. If there's one point I wish I could effectively communicate to the HN community this thing about not going generic is it, because it makes the difference between interesting and lame discussion.)