I originally thought bradleyjg was being more critical than that, but you might be right. Edit: here&#x27;s a good example of substantive criticism: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11096847" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11096847</a><p>It&#x27;s definitely not the case that one can only praise a person or describe without opinion. But I would push back a little against the formulation &quot;Person X is bad&quot;. That&#x27;s the sort of thing people say about an enemy, and one can&#x27;t have civil discourse and war at the same time.<p>It&#x27;s better to criticize something a person did or said than to denounce the whole of them. Not one of us would like to be regarded as merely the sum of the bad we did, nor would we consider it fair.