Please ban me from the orange hellsite so that I'm never tempted on commenting something ever again, while you reflect on why you're defending such garbage people
Yes, commenters do bear some responsibility for the subthreads that come from their comments. These things are pretty predictable, after all. (To be fair, I probably came down on cryptohacks a little too harshly—it's an occupational hazard, especially after hours of cleaning up shit—sorry, cryptohacks. But the principles hold good.)
I don't agree that it's cowardice to go for substantive discussion rather than people screaming at each other and losing their minds off-topically. I'd say it takes some courage to do that. What strikes me as closer to cowardice (not the best way to put it, but we'll go with your word) is defining one side of these bloodbaths-in-a-teacup as virtuous and the other side as "garbage people", instead of facing the truth that they are co-creations.
Btw, I like Graeber. I personally protected his account on HN and made sure he got to say everything he wanted to here. I think his death was a loss for intellectual life—he may not have been a meticulous scholar but his creativity is not the sort of thing that comes along very often. I think making a big deal out of that one lame sentence about Apple is an example of the stupidest sort of internet battle. At the same time, of course he was an ideological writer and of course that paragraph is ideological rhetoric. That it also contains facts doesn't change that; that's what good rhetoricians do.
Nor is there anything wrong with that paragraph in its original context in a book—a genre where the volume knob needs to be turned up quite a bit at times, and generally wielded with a lot of variation. But McLuhan got it right, the medium is the message, and copy-pasting that paragraph into an internet thread on an inflammatory topic is definitely flamebait. We're trying to learn how to avoid that here because the threads it produces are repetitive, and therefore tedious, and therefore turn nasty. That's really all I'm saying—anything else people are adding onto it (such as secret political agendas, positions on Haitian history, or whatever) is imaginary.