Confusion on community standards on debates in comments

Question

I'm a lurker on this stack and I know that each site can have its own community standards. So, I'm curious if the standards here on comments debating whether or not something would be a good idea are the norm here? Specifically, this question seemed to me to be a purely mathematical question (with a touch of interpretation as to whether the first million was taxed or not) and thus able to be given a simple, closed form answer (which it was).

The comments on both the question and the answer stray far from the actual question into what is good policy/bad policy, workable/not workable, politically viable or not, etc. Am I misreading something, or is that okay here?

Answer 1

Thank you for pointing out this comment thread, but next time please flag it instead of posting on meta. That's easier for you and easier for us.

To answer your question: No, we generally do not want debates on this website. As the help center says:

Politics Stack Exchange is for objective questions about governments, policies and political processes.

It is not a place to advance opinions or debate, but rather for exchanging objective information about the policies, processes, and personalities that comprise the political arena.

Therefore we take the policy on comments very seriously here.

Unfortunately that does not stop some users from engaging in debates. That's especially a problem on questions which hit the "Hot Network Questions" sidebar and thus attract a lot of users from all around the Stack Exchange network who are unfamiliar with this website. But there are also some regular users on this site who just seem unable to not engage in debates on issues they have strong opinions about.

We moderators can not be on this website 24/7. Comment moderation is tedious and time-consuming, because people like to post a lot of comments on this site and it's often a difficult judgment call to decide whether or not a comment is a meaningful addition to the question or just chatter. And it's not a very thankful job either, because people tend to get far more agitated over someone deleting their comment than over letting someone else's comment stay.