To be fair to the original poster, you didn't post his entire statement. If you look at the entire statement, he made several intelligent points about TCM, any one of which could have been the starting point for an intelligent conversation if you disagreed with what he had to say. Lots of comments on HN could be considered a "middlebrow dismissal," but this is not one of them.

On another note, the original statement in question kind of reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote:

"I really didn't want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work."