Well, how would you characterize what's gone wrong in AStonesThrow's comment, which:
(1) Makes a total of zero factually correct claims;
(2) refers to citation of secondary sources as "original research";
(3) includes a swipe; and
(4) cites a chemistry textbook claiming that rectus and sinister are "Latin for right and left" as support for the idea that "chemists are better at Latin than you gave them credit for", without bothering to provide any support for the idea that those definitions are correct?
If their argument is false, sure, correct them. Our role as moderators is not to evaluate accuracy of comments; discussion is the way to find the truth.
Our role is to uphold the guidelines, and your comment started with a swipe of the kind that has been clearly outside the guidelines and norms on HN from the very beginning.
We've called out your parent commenter before and will do so again if they clearly transgress the guidelines, but in this case, the swipe in your comment was an escalation and was more egregious than anything in the parent comment.
For the record, nobody flagged the parent comment, whereas several community members flagged yours.
Please edit swipes out of comments. It's one of the first and most important things we ask for in the Comments section of the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html